So where can we listen to this?

Looks like the Xbox YouTube channel or on any podcast platform. I assume something like an Xbox account on Spotify lol 

...Thought Halo Infinite was already on it.

I'm hearing rumors in my head that Sony and MS will team up to launch the next gen as one platform, splitting R&D costs evenly, and splitting hardware loss/profits evenly (if and when it is ever sold for a profit) so that both companies have an easier time selling both hardware and software.

Because it will be co-owned by them and because Nintendo is not part of it, it won't be considered a monopoly.

It'd be funny if Ubisoft swapped to Azure for their Cloud service, it'd be like Ubisoft paying Microsoft for Microsoft to pay Ubisoft.

Today is XBOX DAY

So, why do development costs explode so much? Wasn't all this stuff about the new Unreal Engine and other engines supposed to do wonders for devs to create something in very short time which took ages in the past? I swear I saw some Unreal Engine videos the last years which were all about creating phenomenal looking things with ease...and not only from Epic but also from many people doing videos about it mentioning how it's all so simplified now so that you can skip a lot of stuff you had to do in the past.

And since they don't need more people for the music or the story as 10 years ago, there shouldn't be such an explosion in costs...

That would be shocking, so shocking I'm quite skeptical.

Most of the AAA cost explosion happened before Unreal 5 was introduced honestly. I don't think we have heard the development figure budget for a single Unreal 5 game yet, so there is no way to know if it will cut costs or not.

UE5 was indeed supposed to cut costs through increased automation, which is why so many AAA devs have switched to UE5 now, abandoning their proprietary engines in the process. The nanite texture library of photogrammetry scanned texture assets is supposed to save time and money over having technical artists design their own textures, UE5 is supposed to automatically handle the the Level of Detail (LoD's) distances for those texture assets based on the target platform you input (so you can input Series X and it will automatically handle LoD's for Series X optimization for you), cutting down on hand optimization of LoD's. Lumen lighting meanwhile is supposed to remove the need for a technical lighting artist to hand create a light map for a given scene, and instead automatically handle lighting. 

However, all of those claims are untested for now, and some of the early UE5 games that have released like Palworld have had some technical issues, so it's looking unlikely that UE5 will be the miracle cure for the AAA budgets problem.