I am not a business person, so maybe I am completely stupid, but at the same time...I can't help but feel like after all the money Microsoft has spent on acquisitions, to just say become a third party publisher, how does that make any financial sense at all??
The optics from my perspective is that being a third party publisher would never be the big money maker that Microsoft wants it to be. Yes, Xbox hardware is in a bad place, but that's all their own fault. The answer to me though is if they wanted to make a return on that investments from all those big buy outs, the money is still in hardware. The only other option would be to have the biggest most successful store front end, and that's never going to happen, especially on PC, as long as Steam exists. They don't even have the benefit of a greatly successful game like Fortnite right now like Epic does.
The reason I think being a big third party publisher makes no sense is that...Microsoft bought some of the biggest third party publishers in the industry, and it was just a drop in the bucket for the coffers of money they have. If you asked a lot of people who was one of the richest third party publishers during the 2010s, it would be Activision, and Microsoft just bought them outright. All that success for Activision, and it was still low enough for Microsoft to say "we're gonna buy you out". Sony and Nintendo make too much money for Microsoft to consider doing that for either one of them, and I think that's because they have their own consoles, and storefronts that people buy games from. They get that sweet percentage from all game sales and DLC purchases.
Microsoft has their own store too, but the Xbox hardware is the only chance you're going to get people to want to prefer your storefront. I just don't get it. This whole thing with Xbox makes my head spin.