M1chl
Currently Gif and Meme Champion
I think this conversation is stupid, MS is making (or loosing depends) money, when they lock their users into wallet garden. Console is the way to do it easily, I don't think they are exiting this lucrative market, because then those GamePass numbers would not be in millions. And they love their subscription.
Consoles are cheap, given that pretty much the whole thing is offloaded to AMD, with their drivers and so on. Granted this approach has its own advantages, like the freesync support out of the box and basically anything AMD develops, it just works on console out of the box (if GPU supports it, isn't too old). Their storage is from Surface team and so on.
Sony seems to spent much more on R&D and whole customisation of the silicon.
Given that I have access to the licenced Consoles, I see much more development on MS platforms (granted it could be just that Sony got it right, which they mostly did), pretty much every week new build, if they would truly leave, I don't think they would bother with console specific APIs. This also makes development much more annoying on flip side, because shit you wrote in one week could be deprecated in the next one and removed in next month, etc...
All in all, I don't really think it's worth for them, if they have their HW team and AMD at hand to exit the market. I am sure there will be some cross agreement, that MS will make Win not shit on AMD and AMD will provide something they have on hand. Will they go with ARM64 next time? I am unsure even when they snatched few M1 engineers and have good relationship with qualcomm which also snatched large part of OG M1 team. So its possible. Then they would save big time on silicon, given how much arm licence cost vs how much x86_64 cost to licence and customize.
I could be wrong, but this is how I see it from inside the industry.
Consoles are cheap, given that pretty much the whole thing is offloaded to AMD, with their drivers and so on. Granted this approach has its own advantages, like the freesync support out of the box and basically anything AMD develops, it just works on console out of the box (if GPU supports it, isn't too old). Their storage is from Surface team and so on.
Sony seems to spent much more on R&D and whole customisation of the silicon.
Given that I have access to the licenced Consoles, I see much more development on MS platforms (granted it could be just that Sony got it right, which they mostly did), pretty much every week new build, if they would truly leave, I don't think they would bother with console specific APIs. This also makes development much more annoying on flip side, because shit you wrote in one week could be deprecated in the next one and removed in next month, etc...
All in all, I don't really think it's worth for them, if they have their HW team and AMD at hand to exit the market. I am sure there will be some cross agreement, that MS will make Win not shit on AMD and AMD will provide something they have on hand. Will they go with ARM64 next time? I am unsure even when they snatched few M1 engineers and have good relationship with qualcomm which also snatched large part of OG M1 team. So its possible. Then they would save big time on silicon, given how much arm licence cost vs how much x86_64 cost to licence and customize.
I could be wrong, but this is how I see it from inside the industry.