Wman1996 said:
In all fairness, even with diminishing market viability for Xbox consoles from the 360 days, Microsoft Gaming/Microsoft as a whole has effectively limitless coffers. |
I'm not sure if this is true anymore. Microsoft does indeed have all the money to burn, but in about 5 years XBox/Microsoft Gaming have spent near a trillion dollars in videogame stuff (both the massive buyouts of Zenimax and ABK, smaller studios and buying stakes on other videogame-related things). If Microsoft sees that mantaining the XBox hardware side of things is holding them back from the monumental profits they need to pay the bill, they could probably write it off, or turn it around as "pre-made gaming PCs with windows and many XBox features".
If the Xbox console does not get exclusives big enough to justify its purchase, they will continue to lose marketshare, both Sony and MS are porting to PC already, but MS is also porting to PlayStation, so it's even worse for them. And at this point, Microsoft is pretty much the biggest 3rd party publisher in the west, if not the world (not counting mobile stuff), so it's not like they couldn't negotiate good conditions with the platform holders, while having the GamePass option for revenue from PC gamers and those XBox PCs I mentioned earlier.
Tl.DR. If Microsoft sees XBox console hardware dragging down profits, they will chop it off without remorse, they've spent too much to not do so.
Essay Pro