Absolute nonsense
Do you think the Xbox division themselves have taken the hit while Game Pass has been in the growth stage, or do you think MS did?
Do you think the Xbox division themselves were profitable enough to fund the Activision/Bethesda acquisitions, or did MS fund them?
MS is trying to drag Sony in to a fight they can’t win. Once Sony go all in on Plus what’s to stop MS from going and spending £100b on EA and Ubisoft and taking a loss on Game Pass for the next 20 years?
Yeah the difference is that Sony Group as a whole is pretty much being carried by the Games division right now.
Sony's game (G&NS) segment accounted for
30% of total sales and a whopping
56% of total operating income for FY21.
For Microsoft, it doesn't give detailed number for Xbox (it's within the More Personal Computing (MPC) segment).
However, MPC accounted for
30% of total sales and just
25% of total operating income for its FY22.
In that case we can assume that gaming accounts for significantly
less than 25% of operating income since Windows OEM and cloud services (also within the MPC segment) likely have very high profit margins.
Just looking at the numbers alone, it's pretty clear that Sony cannot run its gaming business the way Microsoft is running its gaming business. Microsoft knows that, which is why they cannot keep competing the way they have before. Not sure about 20 years but yeah Microsoft
could run it at a loss for a long time if they believed it could drive (Playstation (not necessarily Sony as a whole)) into the ground.
That's one of the beauties of Nintendo's business structure. While people could argue all day over whether Sony would really be fucked if Microsoft really did buy EA and Ubisoft after Bethesda and ActiBliz (I think they would be but some will disagree), it's pretty clear (just looking at the Switch) that people are more than willing to buy Nintendo consoles even if they do not get
traditional third party support (here I'm specifically talking about the full-fat versions of FIFA, Fallout, COD, Battlefield
day and date with the other consoles, not a downgraded port 18 months later or some Switch-specific weird version later on).