I'm a physical collector for all consoles, so unfortunately I still will.  I pre-ordered an X today and will still get a PS5 with disc, but i'm sure Game Pass is not for me.

Hey, it's the objective truth. Japan stopped being the forefront of gaming since the late 2000's. These days it's now the US/EU markets that are growing, expanding into different territories and using different platforms at their disposal, while Japan still tried to put whatever focus they can on 1-2 Japanese made consoles, and some mobile. Even China is growing faster than Japan with games at this rate.

Also, I don't really see this as a monopoly kind of thing, because there's still far, far more players in the industry for MS to acquire, before it reaches that state.

I do wish ppl here would stop trying to cite Sony as some mom & pop store as well. They own quite a bit outside of the games industry, so they are hardly small. 

I have to say I've always felt a lot of the frosty relations Nintendo gets from 3rd parties is from Sony actively encouraging devs to freeze Nintendo out whenever/where ever possible. 

Then they will buy Japan.

I don't understand why everyone thinks that MS is going to make the Bethesda games XB/PC exclusive. It wouldn't make sense from a business perspective to buy a company that gets half of its sales from Playstation, then stop releasing their games on Playstation. It would probably erase more than 50% of the value of the company that they just bought. MS is a giant company, run exclusively "by the numbers". There's no console war BS going on on that board room. It's a bunch of smart business people figuring out how to make more money. And, buying companies and stripping out half of their sales on purpose is not an effective way to do that.

I agree.  Their goal is how to get a return on the 7.5 billion and then some in the least amount of time possible.

Exactly. It's stupid to believe that it'd be practical to spend that much money, then strip half your consumer base from being able to buy the games, effectively cutting into your future profits with the companies you just bought out.

It makes more sense to just run things the way they currently are, by selling to as many as possible. Them upside to MS owning these now, is that Sony cannot outright bribe Bethesda for future titles to go exclusive to PS5, because MS owns them directly. Either that or MS takes the silly bribe and pockets more cash, but if I were them, I'd deny the bribe and just keep going forward with business operations. 

There's a reason why MS kept making sure Minecraft reached as many platforms as possible. They'll do the same with these studios as well. They don't care about one box of plastic, because they are more focused on creating a single giant ecosystem.

Hold on, that is too much topically relevant information, please let's keep this in realm of console war peasant cheer squads.
Besides, it's unfair as Xbox loyalists in US don't even understand football, you have to be fair to both sides now.

Minecraft was a pretty different situation. It's a kids property and MS was likely keen not to limit its ability to reach kids so they could merchandise toys, clothing, and other products. Kids don't have the disposable income to buy multiple systems quite often. 

Similar thing with Cuphead, they're allowing it on different systems. 

Halo, Forza, Gears though ... nothing, nada on Playstation or Switch. I think Bethesda's IP will fall into this category. You want to play those games and you have to buy a XBox, Windows PC, or Game Pass. 

Who knows too, there may well come a day when MS pulls Minecraft from other platforms. It's their IP, they're under no obligation to share it. 

i gotta be honest I do find the most entertaining part about all this to be that the same people who shit on xbox for years with stuff like "xbox has no games, phil is just a hype man who is just all talk and does nothing, xbox is irrelevant" etc are now the same people who are acting like they're shocked and dislike what microsoft is doing

it's like people forgot they were a trillion dollar company lmao. once so eager to shit on them but now that they're making moves and using the fabled Warchest(TM) to fix the very things that those people criticized them for now they suddenly don't like that either, at least keep that same energy