(Business Perspective) Does MS really need Xbox Hardware?

[Conina]

Azzanation said:

Conina said:

And how much will it cost them to run the games on their servers, provide 90TF GPU performance + appropriate CPU performance and stream the individual results to 50 million xCloud users for 5+ years instead? Including hardware costs, electricity costs, cooling costs, costs for the additional buildings, costs for maintence and support...?

Of course not every user plays 24/7, so they won't need 50 million systems for 50 million users. But the costs for Microsoft rise immensely for every "teraflop" they give their users additionally, so I doubt they would be that generous. 

MS own Azure and their infrastructure, the best part of it all is with or without Xbox, Azure will still exist. Adding Xbox to the Azure Cloud network will cost nothing since its already an operational business model under MS. So MS will pay the bills, the same bills they are paying now. They wont have to worry about losing $10b on hardware sales.

That's very naive.

Of course they would have to expand virtual machines for tens of millions additional xCloud users. Every Teraflop they have to calculate for the additional xCloud-needs they can't calculate at the same time for other customers.

Other customers who pay a "little bit" more for their virtual machines than $15 per month: https://azureprice.net/?_memoryInMB_min=16

And every additional teraflop Microsoft calculates "in the cloud" produces costs for them (more energy, more cooling, more servers, perhaps even additional lots and buildings for expansion of the new servers...)

Last edited by Conina - on 12 June 2023