I have no idea what Sony, Ninty, and MS would find acceptable.  All I know is that Phil more or less said that they can't reach an agreement with those guys.  My assumption would be that the MS doesn't want to raise the price of the service, and that giving a few dollars of it to the platform holder makes the math not work for MS.  

Yup that pretty much sums it up. Series X is more of a formality to show they're still making consoles and for people to gawk at the specs. But I still think we'll be shocked once MS announces the price. It will probably be a niche product with a niche price, as I don't see why MS would be willing to take a hit on each console sold if they don't care about building a huge install base in the first place. My guess is that they'll be talking a lot more about the price of Lockhart in August and reveal the price of Series X on the low.

I do like GP as well and it will probably be a financial success for MS, I just wished they had a bit more faith in Series X. I honestly think they could have given the ps5 a run for its money if they had something like Halo Infinite as a launch title and designed as a technical showcase for Series X. It sure would have been way more exciting to kick off next gen. Without competition, I just hope Sony doesn't get lazy, though.  

"We're staying here and developing for all systems" er... I guess you must have missed the part where none of the games coming from MS are coming to Xbox One (State of Decay 3, Forza Motorsport, Everwild, Hellblade 2, Avowed, and Fable). 

• PlayStation are more focused on next-gen.
• Xbox are more focused on Game Pass.
• Nintendo are more focused on hybrid/portable market and their evergreen IPs.
• Water is still wet.

What this translates to:

• PlayStation will be the faster selling next-gen system.
• Xbox have the best subscription model, and while supporting cross-gen still has far more momentum coming into the next gen. By getting more people into their ecosystem, they help their chances of an increased market share long-term, even though they'll probably still 'lose'.
• Nintendo will still have the best-selling system until 2022 at least.

Don't worry. Lord Gabe wouldn't tell us all to buy the new Xbox over PS if it was just some niche side-product

MS can't support the Xbox One forever, but all of those games will run fine on any half decent pc. Hell, I'm currently playing Ori in 120fps and 1440p already on my modest GTX1060. 

Like I been saying for months. We won't see any exclusives really pushing Series X until specs equal or better than a RTX2080 and NVME SSD becomes standard among pc gamers. Maybe we'll see a massive price drop when AMD and NVIDIA's new gpu's come out and it won't be that long. But if the prices stay the way they are, next gen could be half way over until that happens.

From what I heard the RTX3070 will be on par with a RTX2080, so it's going to be interesting to see how much that'll cost. Especially since the prices of the RTX20xx card is expected to skyrocket as they stopped production and there's an increased demand from cryptocurrency miners.

You just answered the main question. Xbox consoles aren't the main platform, but they are an access to the main platform. So for Microsoft to get people on Gamepass, their best access point is a console. That's all the purpose it serves. Plus all those 3rd party and first party sales from people not on Gamepass is just a bonus. 

People don't seem to understand the role of dcloud in the Gamepass debate. With xcloud, they won't need you to have a good PC. You can just stream the games on it or on your phone or even on the switch if that ever happens. And then, Microsoft can easily make the most advanced games and so can 3rd party devs. Just stream when your PC or platform of choice ain't powerful enough and play locally if it is. Simple enough formula. The real roadblock is internet speeds around the world and nothing else

At least we have some indirect confirmation that GP is in fact awesome if Sony was the one to implement it. 

Still takin' jabs, I see. 

I always thought it was a good product, I always thought it was a good value, but it's still not a good enough reason to get an Xbox. If the exact same service was on a console I already had, it'd be great! I'm not buying an Xbox Series X for Gamepass, though. I can already get most of those games on the PS4/5 (and many of which I already have and don't need to buy a subscription for), while the exclusives just aren't plentiful or good enough. However, if I didn't have to make that massive investment of a new console, then yeah! it'd be worth it for Gears 17.

Would you say Nintendo accepted defeat since the Wii? Doesn’t seem to be bothering them much. Unlike Nintendo that stopped trying to compete in traditional hardware MS is doing both. Traditional hardware/games but also services that just take the industry in a new direction.