Also forcing the xbox hardware division to be standalone business is likely to be failure, xbox very famously doesn't make money off the consoles. The accessories may make profits but enough??? Very unsure.
They maybe to have some rev split with the ms store but not sure whether it would work out.
The only way rev split as a concession would work is if MS is upfront about actual Game Pass revenue, which currently, they aren't. They obfuscate Game Pass revenue.
The hardware business has no value without the implied and actual connections between it and whatever IP and software production MS has to offer.
I do think that the day MS ceases investing in dedicated hardware is coming, the amount of money lost so far is not negligible, especially when you are firing employees companywide in a bear market.
Personally I don't see them so much as ending dedicated hardware so much as shifting the Xbox model into something more PC-centric. Selling the hardware at a profit, opening it up for full Windows support, being a truly multi-platform publisher (outside of any timed PC exclusives which hardware-wise would make them timed Xbox exclusives in comparison to Sony & Nintendo systems, though they'd still bring those games to those consoles if able i.e Flight Sim to PS as a hypothetical example), thereby also allowing Steam, GOG, EGS and other storefronts as usable on the hardware.
I could definitely see them shifting it to a Steam Deck/Steam Machines model; considering Valve sort of wants to shift PC game dev reliance away from Windows and to Linux/Steam OS, MS might want to prioritize the platform that's been their actual bedrock and their actual gaming origins, and leverage Xbox hardware to do it.
I know SEGA on a Wednesday is a meme but I completely agree. Strong PC footprint with Football Manager and Total War. Solves the Japanese question with Yakuza, Persona and Megami Tensei. Sonic as a mascot too. Plus with the insane back catalogue they could add to Game Pass; Virtua Fighter, Virtua Tennis, Super Monkey Ball, their kart racers and their classic collections. Strong ties between MS and SEGA historically too.
I get that CoD and King are money makers but they're just going for the normie market with ABK.
You do realize MS got a ton of SEGA exclusives on the OG Xbox without needing to acquire them, right? Also if you think Sony is being pissy over ABK, you haven't seen anything yet if MS go after SEGA because that's when Nintendo starts getting a LOT more vocal.
They're not going to risk letting Sonic move away from Nintendo hardware (or its fanbase) as its primary home, or lose the ability to do stuff like the Sonic & Mario Olympics series.
To be clear here, when I made that post, I wasn't necessarily assuming that any company would actually want to purchase the Xbox brand hardware + Xbox Live infrastructure, so if nobody like Tencent, Amazon, Electronic Arts, etc. decide that they want to acquire the Xbox hardware division from Microsoft, then the Xbox Series X|S consoles would just wither away and experience the fate of the Dreamcast, and for the online services on Xbox consoles to be summarily shut down by Microsoft with a given committed date provided as agreed to with the regulators in such a hypothetical scenario. Again, I want to emphasize that's just my prediction of what I think the CMA is going to do come next week with their provisional findings. So is that a painful price for Microsoft to pay? Of course yes, but that would be what they would have to do to obtain a mammoth-sized third party publisher that's multiple times larger than Zenimax in Activision-Blizzard-King.
Going directly up against Sony head-to-head in the high-performance console market is certainly intimidating, and I wouldn't blame other potential companies looking at a Microsoft withdrawal from that market to decide they don't want to battle Sony in that market, just as Sony gave up on the mobile, lower-powered handheld console market that Nintendo has a stone-cold lock in practically, with their last handheld being the PlayStation Vita, released in 2011. So yeah, under my prediction, if that's what the CMA + European Commission + FTC decide to go with as a major structural remedy, there's a high chance that we won't see another direct competitor to PlayStation in the high-performance console market for another 10-15 years.
Is that a terrible thing to see happen, no more Xbox and only PlayStation and Nintendo in their respective market segments for video game console market? It's certainly a controversial question I'd imagine to even posit on a video game forum website, but honestly, after seeing how well PlayStation 5 consoles sales performance were this past quarter in the crucial holiday period in the United States (Xbox's best region), I'm not sure there's any stopping PlayStation at this point from simply grabbing so much marketshare for the 9th console generation that by 2027-2028, and that they will have increased their marketshare so much globally that they'll just be considered practically invincible in the high-performance console market.
Personally I don't see regulators forcing MS to divest Xbox out of Microsoft, that's probably a step too drastic IMO especially if it'd probably spell the end of the brand, effectively.
Which is why I'm more on the "spin COD out into its own entity" train. Just spin it off as The COD Company, allot the ABK teams needed into that company, have them operate as their own entity and MS retains partial ownership. That at least resolves things with Sony's concerns, and MS still gets to keep the other ABK IPs (Crash, Spyro, Tony Hawk, Guitar Hero, Candy Crush etc.).
It doesn't resolve the issues Apple, Google, Amazon, Nvidia etc. have, though and those basically revolve around Game Pass & xCloud. For those, does Microsoft make Game Pass its own division (IIRC currently it's a part of the Xbox division) alongside xCloud? Do they just accept the licensing fee they'd have to pay to Apple, Google etc. for the app on their platforms, or try waiving that for a rev share model? Technically speaking I think the licensing fee would be cheaper in the long-run than a rev share model, although they have to pay the amount up-front.
What if part of the issue with Game Pass/xCloud on Apple, etc. platforms is more to do with whatever licensing fee MS has companies like Apple pay for iTunes on Windows? If MS waives those sorts of fees, does that in turn allow Apple, Google etc. to waive theirs? I did a quick look and it seems the cost for a Developer license on Windows is $99 for companies, single-time payment. If MS has a case where, their Windows fee is significantly lower than that which Apple, Google etc. charge for apps on their platforms, then maybe MS argues that to regulators?
Though from what I understand MS simply doesn't want to pay any licensing fees to Apple, Google, etc. for Game Pass on their app store and I don't see how that specific argument works out for them. Especially considering that, while companies like Apple and Google do sell their phones at big profit margins, only a small portion of users actually acquire their phones that way. It seems the majority go through cellular providers to get those and companies like Apple probably only get a small portion of the money from those subscriptions (or do they just sell the phones upfront to the service providers?). So they can theoretically argue that they subsidize the bulk of their hardware to service providers and rely on the cuts from apps in their stores to sustain their business models.
