Sure Phil, sure that's the reason.

Fair stance.

It's kind of true and one of the reasons PS3 games sold like crap compared to 360 games. The best indicator ultimately is the amount of XBL / PSN subscribers and obviously game sales. 

X consoles sold doesn't necessarily mean the same amount of active users.

PS4 is killing it now though. There is nothing MS can do to turn it around.

So did I miss the announcement about how many active gold subs there are and how many active users there are per platform? I can only recall MS bragging about XBox One outselling PS4 for the last 6 months of the year. The last 'count' was in October at 47 million users logged in at least once during the previous month on pc+360+one. I guess the active user count went down as they choose to highlight sales again.

Third post nails it.

The funny thing is if they had been reporting MAU consistently during the last gen instead of sellthrough, the number would never have climbed nearly as high as 80 million. Last gen had red ring of death, can you imagine how many people had to buy another 360 because of that? After our third one broke we switched to PS3. I can't imagine how revealing MAU would have been last gen, and the difference in how it benefits MS this gen with substantially less hardware failures.

Nope, they've shown tons of games 3 years ahead of release. When was it that quantum break started getting hyped? 

"They opened the generation hyping a big new AAA stealth/spy IP from Black Tusk, including an E3 teaser trailer completely fabricated from whole cloth and let it float out there like it wasn't absolute bullshit. Then it disappeared and next thing we know Black Tusk is now The Coalition and assigned to turn out Gears games into perpetuity.

They hyped Scalebound at E3 2014, it's now cancelled.

That same E3 they hyped Phantom Dust, also with a complete fabrication of a teaser trailer, by one developer's account have churned through some studios, and the game is coming along so well that when Scalebound was cancelled it didn't even get mentioned on their PR release for upcoming 2017 titles.

Fable Legends was shown and hyped at a time when Lionhead was just hollowed out in terms of staffing. They kept acting like it was a real product. Turns out all the concern related to them having two big rounds of layoffs at the studio leading up to the Fable Legends hype was rather legitimate.

Project Knoxville was cancelled and the studio closed to, in MS' own words, "focus its investment and development on the games and franchises that fans find most exciting and want to play".

This goes along with MS' history of hyping games only to can them. Titles like True Fantasy Live Online and B.C. on Xbox, Project Milo and Project Spark, both show hyped X360 games that never turned into anything, not to mention cancelled partnership projects like Halo: Chronicles and Marvel Universe Online.

It isn't even that MS cancels games. Everyone does. Cancelling the Obsidian project and the like is similar to things that both Sony and Nintendo have done. But MS has a long history of coming to trade shows, showing "conceptual video" of a game no where near that developmental state, letting everyone make assumptions, then when reality sets in a few years later taking the project out back and shooting it while hoping no one notices.

Serious gamers, the kind of people who post here, buy systems for the games we expect to come. MS' entire strategy here is to get this group hyped for their system assuming we won't actually ever hold them accountable for these absurdly early showings that with a sad frequency never even make it out the door. It's made worse by the fact that many of these projects were clearly falsified technically just to make something look cool and their cancellations either reveal that there was no "there" there (Black Tusk's game, B.C.) or that the tech simply didn't work. (Project Spark, Milo)"

This is is legitimately just what Ms does. They would've shown scale bound regardless if it was broken or not so we'll never know. Was fable legends broken too? The quote above is from "Drek" on NeoGAF. He made an excellent post that highlights what's been going on with MS and trying to get new IP out and this is the meat of his post, although there's some potatoes he added that I can quote if anyone wants to read. It's good stuff.

Not that many at all since MS had a well publicised  replacement programme. 

I was imagining millions 

That's some first class spinning!

That's not even remotely true.

Will you say that when Crackdown 3 releases? That was shown for 3 E3 plus other conferences too. Quantum Break was shown for multiple E3's and that release has come and gone already.

showing the same games over and over just says to the people "we don't have many things coming" a hell of a lot more than "there's something wrong with our products".