Nintendo and sony are market leaders, dont see that changing any time soon.

It's Still PlayStations and Nintendo's market to lose.

The powermove MS just pulled off, by forking out 7,5$ billion and getting ZeniMax, put them right at the top of the pack, if if not atleast equal to the others now.

ZeniMax: Bethesda Softworks + Arkane Studios + Alpha Dog+ Bethesda Game Studios+ id Software + MachineGames + Roundhouse + Tango Gameworks

Its insane that future Doom/Fallout games may be console exclusives to xbox imo.

(voted its a pretty level playing field now)

I think Microsoft will fundementally shift/change/break a lot of the traditional market.

They are looking at the future of the business and want to secure the market for the Netflix of games before Google/Sony/Amazon/Netflix itself get there.

That and streaming too raises a lot of questions. It's not about platforms for MS, think they are looking at it as services and they want to be on top.

I've tried xCloud ($1 intro month, why not) on Android phones ... and y'know it is basically very playable. The lag is really not that perceptible and I don't even have the greatest connection. I'm able to play a fast paced fighting game even like Killer Instinct and pull of combos without much fuss. 

What is the console market when people don't need a console and can just play even the highest end games on any display they feel like (phone, tablet, PC, TV) just through an app, with 5G becoming eventually the standard, in 5, 6, 7 years, you can sorta see what MS is thinking. With no hardware, everything is a service and if they have the defacto service, well then they have the last laugh over Sony. 

I don't think the console market is stabilizing ... I think it's headed for some potentially massive changes. Even software pricing, what is $60-$70 for one single game when a service is offering you 200-300 games, including new release titles, for only $10 a month. 

I think this analysis leaves out a big thing: that the console market is only a submarket to the bigger gaming market. In the past the console submarket as a whole was nearly consumed in the video game crash. Since then it has carved out it's niche. But that is changing.

By now PC-gaming and console-gaming - which were for a long time quite separate - are more and more similar, with games releasing on both submarkets. This is not a problem per se, but if one submarket gets into trouble it is easy for gamers and devs to jump to the other, as they are both quite similar in gaming choices by now. You already can see it, as some geographical markets (like China and Korea) nearly completely avoid consoles in favor of PC-gaming. In other regions it is the other way around.

The second challenge comes from the mobile area. Given, we have mobile games around for a while, and they are a pretty separate niche. But mobile devices get more powerful and devs more ambitious. The big problem for the mobile market is monetization.

But the biggest challenge ahead is cloud gaming. And that has the potential to completely remodel all other gaming markets. I actually think the Zenimax-acquisition is not so much to fight against Sony and Nintendo, but MS bulking up to fight the cloud-gaming wars.

The thing is, you only can see a consolidation in the console market by ignoring the outside. But the coming changes may destroy the console market completely, more likely though they will transform the role of consoles. And how the current companies will do under these circumstances and if other competitors join under the new possibilities is something that is quite hard to get a grasp on.

Is there going to even be much of a fight for the "streaming wars" because right now it looks like Microsoft is way ahead of anyone else and it looks like the board of directors is all in on becoming the Netflix of gaming, you don't just drop 7.5 billion on a gaming company if it wasn't approved by the top end of MS brass. 

If Sony decides to try to get into an acquistion fight with MS, I think that's going to end badly for them. They don't have the money to spend that MS has and if the XBox division now has the full support of MS to do whatever it takes to get that Netflix of Gaming goal accomplished ... well that could get ugly real fast for Sony. 

Even after the adquisition, I still want to see if Microsoft is going to reinforce their dedication to hardware or if they are going to focus more on making the Game Pass accessible to more platforms.

GamePass isn't some "side thing" though if it gains massive traction, then the idea of the console itself begins to get very blurry. 

I know, that's the thing. GamePass can become the most profitable part of XBox if they handle it correctly. I'm pretty sure they would gladly abandon the hardware market entirely if they could offer their Game Pass on Nintendo and PlayStation consoles.

I'm not sure there even is a Playstation if MS' vision of what the console market is going to become turns out.