@X_CAPCOM_X: how are they ahead when they have no cloud network or data centers they can leverage from to expand their service?
They do have those things. They also have more users and revenue from game streaming. There's a world outside of SW, you know.
Also, way to miss my argument. You seem to have picked that one detail to contest when it doesn't change the narrative of my argument whether its true or not.
@Pedro: in regards Gamepass, right on with the content coming within the upcoming years but seeing a good amount of 3rd party support to boot. Next week Strange Brigade and Mutant Year Zero will drop on Gamepass.
@the-a-baum: I think that is the idea. The Xbox will become a device, one method, to play games in the Microsoft Eco-system. Another way to play games in that same ecosystem will be on a PC. I would guess it will be sort of like a super-beefed up AppleTV.
Good old Microsoft. Since they annonced the xOne they say how much they are investing into gaming. Yet they are still by far the worst when it comes to their exclusives. Heck, where is my AoE4? How many years can it take to make Halo 6? Why did you cancel Scalebound? How can Crackdown 3 take so long to make?
They've lost so much money with gaming it's hard to imagine them exiting before being able to make some fo that back. The Business Wards podcast about them beefing with Sony and Nintendo is interesting.
I knew a guy who worked for MS corporate as a lead product analyst. I asked him years ago if MS would leave gaming and he said probably never. Because to MS it is the one brand they have that they consider ( cool).
I didn't know if he had a clue what he was talking about but it makes sense. MS makes alot of money but nobody has passion for windows and cloud servers. They just use it because it works. But Xbox is the one brand that actually allows MS to have fanboys.
Yeah, a savvy shareholder is going to have a battery of questions on this all too nebulous language. If he's going to address investors in this manner, he'd better be ready to tell them why they should expect returns for these efforts. For example--
How many of the 2 billion that play games online are utilizing a console to do it? How many of those are on an Xbox? How many of those are on an Xbox One? How much revenue does this generate for MS relative to the infrastructure necessary to support it?
Do you have a product and service roadmap designed to counter or get ahead of or take advantage of the growing mobile game phenomenon?
What makes Xbox Game Pass better than any other similar service? What advantage does that offer to compel more gamers to choose an MS platform over that of any other company with similar offerings?
Why should we expect that Project xCloud would deliver any better than any other similar service that came before it, failures considered? What kind of 'fidelity' should gamers expect?
Etc. I could go on, but it would end about here:
What are the tangible benchmarks we can expect to see with these efforts? How will we know when they've been successful? Is that success measured in return to us, the shareholders or in some other manner?
MS may be willing to invest in gaming, but they don't have a corporate culture which is conducive for the growth of gaming studios under their umbrella. MS is just like EA and Activision. Even once mighty studios like Bioware, Blizzard and Bungie are now on a decline due to these studios. Let's not even mention the studios that got buried 6 feet under. MS will just buy studios up, milk their games till they're worth nothing, then restructure the studio into something else.
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