(Business Perspective) Does MS really need Xbox Hardware?

[DonFerrari]

Shadow1980 said:

As someone who primaries on Xbox, the answer is obviously "no." Xbox Game Studios could go third-party tomorrow and it wouldn't matter much for MS's financials in the long run.

That being said, I'd prefer they didn't. I like their hardware, I vastly prefer their controllers (though the DualSense is Sony's best controller to date), and I think that competition is good for the industry.

Sony losing massive amounts of market share with the PS3, including getting trounced by the 360 in the U.S., caused Sony to make a system that was more affordable for players and easier to develop for.

The PS4's initial reception combined with MS making serious mistakes regarding used games, mandatory online, and forced Kinect caused the pendulum to swing back in Sony's favor, though not quite as hard, and as a result MS quickly abandoned their most controversial plans.

Now here in Gen 9, the only big mess-up either Sony or MS has made is the latter mistakenly thinking that producing more units of the Series S than of the Series X was a good move because it was cheaper and therefore a lower barrier to entry, when in reality it's become clear that in a "you get what you pay for" scenario, people will willingly pay more for the premium SKU.

Not sure if Series S can be considered an error on the metrics you are looking, since it seems to be about 50% of the sales of Series then it clearly have acception by userbase, but sure a stick to put on the TV with a controller for under 100 USD would be a lot better, but it didn't got ready in time.

Azzanation said:

DonFerrari said:

Actually we could even ignore all the details and margins and just ask, what would be the total profit on current situation and what he expect it to be doing what he suggest (won't even ask for justification, breakdown, etc). Because even if the profit margin were to increase with this move the total profit would certainly decrease (even if MS doesn't give the numbers).

Don, you would be the front running of seeing Xbox exit the market, so what brings you here? Clearly not to defend this forecast..?

I already gave my opinion on the subject and very much in topic, would be good to have OP also stay in topic.

And although MS doesn't release games that interest me directly a lot of my friends like and play on it so nope I have no desire for Xbox to leave the market, I have my resistance on them buying big publishers and some other aspects but nothing against they being on the market and competing.