Nintendo profited with less hardware by controlling the prices of their software. You can already buy Detroit and God of War for less than $20 pretty routinely. Never happened with Nintendo back in the day or even modern Nintendo. Sony came into the industry with a loss-leading mentality and Nintendo never really followed. PS3 eventually sold what, close to 90 million or something? Yet Sony lost billions on it at one point and maybe still ended up losing overall, idk.

Yeah, you sell more consoles, you can sell more games. He doesn't say console sales have zero importance. He's talking about a customer already in the Xbox ecosystem, and how MS doesn't need to sell them an S or an X if they're still buying games and subscribing to Gamepass on their launch Xbone. And of course, he's right. And they obviously understand they need to improve their appeal to other gamers in order to grow that install base, otherwise they wouldn't have just bought a shit ton of studios.

The big question is, post-E3, have you made your annual "if __ fails, MS is out of the industry!!" prediction yet? What is it this time? If Elite 2 fails? If Battletoads fails? Please let us know.

And the more hardware you sell the more Software you'll sell. Which is why PS4 has sold twice as many games as the XBO, because it's sold twice as much hardware. Getting a cut of all that third party software is lucrative. Selling less hardware means selling less software and getting less money from third parties. MS don't get a cent when Assassins Creed sells on PC, they do when it sells on Xbox. So selling a lot of hardware guarantees a lot of revenue and people being locked into your closed system generating you revenue.