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Well. Ignoring the reliability of the leaker, in this hypothetical I would ask, how does it make financial sense for the manufacturer? What are they getting out of it? I have to assume that Microsoft would still receive a 30% cut off all transactions as they'd be operating the store so how does the manufacturer make their money? Purely and only off the sales of consoles? They'd have to be really expensive in that case and Xbox isn't big enough for everyone to get a large piece of the pie, how will they differentiate their consoles from each other? The only things that really separate Xbox and PlayStation are power. In addition, Xbox could just undercut them and ruin them all, Lol.
I think it's more likely that Microsoft moves towards an architecture which is adaptable and maybe that's ARM. Maybe that leads to Xbox doing their own form of handheld and being fine with lower sales, I don't see how this manufacturer making Xbox consoles makes sense for the manufacturer though unless Microsoft starts sharing their 30% cut with the manufacturer in which case it no longer makes sense for Microsoft surely? Console market isn't like the PC market, it doesn't have hundreds of millions of customers, its peak is around 150m-ish and Xbox's even lower and it serves a very specific purpose, it feels like one manufacturer would dominate the entire market in this scenario and the others would die.
