(Business Perspective) Does MS really need Xbox Hardware?

[Pemalite]

Azzanation said:

There is good, bad and too much competition. EGS is bad competition, it adds nothing good for customers while dividing customers gaming libraries. Too much competition is Nintendo, PS and Xbox as it causes drastic changes to the market and can also hurt consumers like we have seen with the Paid online which is now standard across the entire console market.

That is a lie.
Epic Game Store is providing 100% free games regularly for customers. - That is competition, that is a massive benefit to consumers.

As for paid online... Microsoft's paid Xbox Live! service was competing with Nintendo's horrible free online service with the DS/3DS/Wii/WiiU and Sony's free Playstation 3 online service.

And Microsoft's paid service won. - It offered more bandwidth, lower latencies, more content and had better uptime as well as more support and services for online games leveraging it's comprehensive network. - Remember when the Playstation Network went offline for several weeks after following the hack? Yeah. More investment was needed.

Eventually Sony and Nintendo saw that the best way to compete with Microsoft's paid online service was to move to a paid model with larger investments into their online infrastructure... With regular "free" games thrown in as an incentive.

So again. You lied.

Azzanation said:

You understand the IPs that Xbox own right? Games like Doom, Quake, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Halo, Gears, Forza and many more which Sony can earn 30% cut from all their sales. Why would they say no to that?

Simple. If a gamer buys a Microsoft game on a Sony platform, Sony might get a 30% cut. - But because Microsoft is vertically integrated, Microsoft has the capacity to side-step Sony's other services to support that game, Servers, CDN's, Advertising incentives and more... So Sony misses out on additional value-add revenue.

Sony also wants to sell us it's services just like Microsoft. - It's very much likely going to be abrasive towards gamepass being pushed on Playstation.

Azzanation said:

Thats why moving forward, the console is the old dinosaur method. Xbox will still have a eco-system just wont need to spend billions of RnD to create consoles. They have the infrastructure to push Streaming and Digital.

Microsoft is vertically integrated.

Like the evidence I provided earlier... Every part of Xbox flows onto Microsoft's other business ventures from fire/rescue to heavy industry to corporate/white collar to your regular consumers. - That R&D will still need to be invested with or without Xbox as Microsoft will still need to develop hardware and software.

It's literally the Apple business model which has made Apple so successful.