(Business Perspective) Does MS really need Xbox Hardware?

[Pemalite]

Azzanation said:

Pemalite said:

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.

Lie? You understand that these are words actually exist.

---What is bad competition?---

Negative competition occurs when we compete with others so that we want to win at the expense of the other person or people involved. In other words, our success is predicated on their failure.

Competition is good when its balanced. EGS hasn't made Steam better, it's done the opposite by taking games that were meant to release on Steam and making them exclusive, forcing Steam customers to cross over to an inferior store front. If that's what you consider good competition than I heavily disagree with you. If Steam went out of line that I would agree with you but Steam hasn't. It's been the best value in gaming since its release. It didn't need competition 15 years ago and it doesn't need it now. 

The thing you don't seem to comprehend is that...

Additional competition to Steam does -not- mean that Steam -must- get better. - That isn't how competition always works.

There are many instances in history where companies were complacent and didn't innovate, but their competitors did... And then stole marketshare because they offered a better alternative.

Case in point: Intel failed to compete and innovate, they controlled the market, they were a monopoly. - AMD came along with Zen and completely undermined Intel in every sector it plays in... Consumers got better CPU's out of it, even if it's from a completely different company.

And that is the key here.

Epic Store -is- providing Steam with competition and if Steam doesn't react, Epic will continue to steal users and we get to enjoy our -free- games.

We consumers benefit from the competition. - Competition is NOT always bi-directional like you seem to think it is.

So yes you lied.

Epic entering the market has brought forth competition.

We got free games out of it.