Good point! To be fair few people outside of nationalistic flag pumping and rabid fans/influencers were cheering the idea of spending over $70 Billions to buy revenue, lie through their teeth, and still destroy value…
That is true. The problem is, a lot of the games media were among the ones cheering the acquisition through. Them, the fanatics, and 'Murica, F*ck Yeah!" group were the loudest by far even if they were a small fraction of total people talking about or following the deal.
Incidentally, seems MS really needed it to go through just to salvage their gaming division. Otherwise I think we'd be hearing of Xbox getting shut down by the end of this year.
The only benefit is that it's difficult to do worse than Hellblade.
Pentiment probably performed worst than Hellblade II in player metrics & sales, so Phil's already accomplished that!
They could do it but that doesn’t seem to be their plan, we would’ve had some rumours like the Pro specs by now and Mr Talkytalk Spencer would’ve said something. All they say now is that they’re working on the next Xbox and that it’ll be powerful, but their actions say that a Xbox console isn’t needed, don’t worry just use a Firestick and so on.
I think some people are misconstruing Sarah's words. When they say "generational leap" or whatever their exact words were, they aren't talking "power" in the traditional console sense. I mean, yes, the next Xbox hardware will probably aim within the ballpark of PS6 performance-wise, for the high-end model, but they just can't compete with Sony and Nintendo in the mass-market gaming space anymore.
So to me, they must be aiming for a "leap" in terms of blurring lines between a console and PC. That's why they've been talking about Steam on Xbox here and there. Most likely, the next Xbox systems are going to run whitelisted Windows apps through their storefront, and they'll add extended functionality to Xbox OS for Windows features through some abstraction layer to run programs like Steam, accessed through some Game Pass tier.
It'll be like Microsoft's version of Wine, but for Xbox OS to run Windows programs. An evolution of the Dev Mode on the current systems, but at the "retail" level. And they'd tie access to other gaming storefronts like Steam to Game Pass to earn money off it being on the console, because chances are B2P sales in the Xbox Store will nosedive when other things like Steam are accessible on the same device (and Valve will have no interest in a revenue sharing model with Microsoft).
That should probably allow them to do a PS6-level "high-end" model at like $699 (assuming PS6 top SKU is $499...it'll probably be more); expensive enough to have good profit margin, cheap enough to still be competitive with mid-and-high end gaming PCs and mini-PCs/NUCs. Plus they'd also likely have some modularity like upgradable DRAM and low-profile dGPUs.
How that'd work with OEMs, most likely is MS makes their version and they license out Xbox OS & the frontend to OEMs who build machines based on the common spec (but maybe offer additional non-gaming stuff like extra USB ports, extra ethernet ports, Thunderbolt ports etc.), and maybe can upclock the CPU, GPU, and RAM if they wish (like how 3P Nvidia & AMD GPUs tend to). Maybe MS helps in parts of manufacturing and the companies share the same wafers (MS puts in the orders for OEM chips for example).
It's kind of the only path Xbox has left for gaming hardware. Even assuming they do a handheld and OEMs do hardware variants of their own (tablets, laptops etc.), this type of Xbox hardware won't be competing with Sony & Nintendo in volume. But they might be able to do between 5 - 7 million annually, maybe a bit more depending on other factors. Which would at least make Xbox hardware respectable again in mass market performance.
HeisenbergFX4
has said it's a bit of a sticker shock), I wonder how the market would react.
