The question as to the role of having their own game console I'm sure is being discussed.
The original plan is gone - there s no living room ownage to be had, only a niche are taking the route that suits MS original vision.
It does give them a box with an MS OS and a store front in homes. The question is what's the actual value or role of that got them strategically?
You could argue important or unimportant depending on how you view market: the question is ultimately which it is that MS decides, useful or not for their business?
my belief is there's still value in the xbox name, and it's something they'll use going forward even if it means doing it without the set top box they had planned for back in 1999.
valve is a first-party game developer at this point, with their platform being steam. i don't think they were viewed as such when steam was first launched, but that is honestly the way of things now. steam is also huge, accessible, and growing every year. it's this model i think microsoft thought they could emulate in a physical sense with the xbox one earlier in 2013. they had the right idea but the most dismal execution. there wasn't even a trade-off for losing your physical copies of games (basically). like if you
could share your games with friends, that might have been something to really set the xbox apart and make always-on drm kind of worth it to a lot of people. but it was either their vision for the platform or nothing at all.
it's a better thing for them that they didn't go through with it, at least in the short-term. i mean even with some incentive, it was still pretty half-assed. it should have been a steam-like platform with a huge hard drive and a controller if they truly wanted to shake things up.
elsewhere we see others starting to reject the traditional model. square-enix, warner bros., ea, and ubisoft all have some sort of alternative distribution method. japan as a whole is mostly leaving the market for mobile, even former giants like capcom and the square side of square-enix. sega is making larger strides to join the pc than ever before, and they're no longer investing in new ips specifically for the console or handheld market (hero bank seems to be the last one - world end eclipse is a vita game, but it's also on the pc and for mobile devices).
and there are now less games being made for the traditional market. there's just too much risk associated with the rising cost and rapidly dwindling userbase. i think that we've entered a sort of downward spiral where developers are becoming more fiercely focused on a lucrative segment of the market, making them spend more than ever before. they're doing so at the expense of reaching out to a broader demographic that could extend the reach of the traditional market.
so i don't know when all of these points will converge in the future, but given microsoft's direction early on, the reports of unhappiness within the board towards the xbox project, and the general outlook of the industry, it's hard to say what the next xbox will look like. i think the most likely scenarios are microsoft making a competitor to steam out of the xbox brand, followed by one more go at the console market, and lastly either spinning off the xbox company into its own thing or just shutting the whole thing down (that last one doesn't seem very possible). depending on sony's financial health five years from now, they might not see it worth it to make another box just to keep fighting an already embattled company. i do think sony will make a very traditional playstation 5 next generation though, and it will sort of be like fiddler's green in the land of the dead, except with less dennis hopper.
