This goes beyond moneyhatting a couple of timed exclusives lol. Like I've been saying for months, Xcloud isn't just some cool optional bonus, it's MS's endgame. This just shows how serious they are about it.

Put on your tinfoil hat and bear with me for a second. At the moment GP has 15m subscribers. I'm guessing most of those subscribers are cheap ass bastards like me, who sign up for a month, play Gears 4/5 and cancel until some new noteworthy games get released. This is why GP is already bleeding money, let alone after a 7.5B acquisition like this.

15m Subscribers is peanuts in the grand scheme of things and I'm sure MS knows they are not going to get a big enough installbase of Series X/S to carry the GP platform. The only way GP can turn profitable is if they can tap into the billions of mobile gamers and massively expand their audience. This is one helluva gamble if you ask me. Are the bulk of the mobile gamers - who never even owned a console - really going to buy and walk around with a Xbox controller and play core games on their phones? Will the total number of gamers really grow exponentially if we don't need to buy consoles anymore and we can all stream games from an app on our TV's? I just don't see that happening at all. What MS seems to be missing is that not everybody with a phone or a TV is a gamer and gamers don't care about Cloud gaming. 

We'll see how this plays out but I honestly see MS releasing GP on ps5/ Switch later on. It would be a win-win for everybody when you think about it, especially for MS shareholders.

Yeah, if you have a good PC you get virtually everything, eventually. and with Steam Sales...well, I bet literally every PC gamer has a backlog over 100 games. 

But with me, I tried to avoid the console wars all last generation. I owned both a PS4 and XBO within a year of launch, and despite having both consoles I literally used the Xbox more to update the firmware than play games on it. I played more Zelda: Breath of the Wild in the first week of having it than I did the Xbox One in its entire 7-year run without a word of exaggeration. I didn't care about the console wars because I was on both sides, if the Xbox got an exclusive like Rare Replay or Sunset Overdrive, I could play them and not care. It just so happened to be that the console only ever got like 5 or 6 games that I actually cared about in 7 years that I didn't get on other consoles. I liked Gears 4 and 5, I liked Sunset Overdrive and Rare Replay, and the MasterChief Collection/Halo 5 were both alright even if I never cared much for Halo. but that's basically it. I got Cuphead and The Ori games on Switch. simple as that. That's it for the entire duration of the console's life cycle, so it got next to no play. 

So going into Gen 9, I knew what console I'd be getting first, maybe only. Xbox hasn't impressed me for this long and my marketplace is slow so I am pretty short on funds; as a result I have to make a choice. this generation I CAN'T afford both and I can't justify getting a 700+ dollar console for a handful of games. I could when I got the Xbox One, I can't now. (That is, assuming these bethesda games are going to be Xbox Exclusive going forward). 

As a result, I feel the console war stirring within me! When I see my 'team' winning, I cheer. when the other team scores a goal, I boo. This is me booing. I'm honest enough with myself to admit that. The second I can afford an Xbox Series X or have enough disposable income to do so, I'll stop caring again because I win either way. Until that happens, I'm on a team and I hope that team wins because then I win through proximity by getting great games.