Gaming is at a crossroads for console players. Xbox consoles have lost another round of sales to Sony’s Playstation 5, and we want to know if the Nintendo Switch 2 is coming.
Why are we in this situation? According to the folks over at IGN and former Xbox boss Peter Moore, Microsoft is discussing if Xbox consoles have a real future. We’ve recently seen the change in exclusives, with Microsoft releasing a handful for Sony and Nintendo. We already know Microsoft puts consoles on the market at a razor-thin margin. Money is made off content and accessories.
The cloud is here; like it or not, gaming is slowly heading that way, and services like GeForceNow are moving faster to get things available to customers than they ever have. Microsoft Azure stands tall and poised for the next leap forward. So what does this mean? Is Peter Moore right? I think so; Microsoft has been itching at the cloud gaming platform for several years. Phil Spencer says consoles are here to stay for the foreseeable future, but are they? Is it time for Xbox Cloud to become an App built into all our devices? It already is; I use Xbox Cloud regularly. If there is any interest in producing a console, does Microsoft need to make the hardware? No, selling the specifications to OEMs takes care of that.
Microsoft is a software company first, that’s its roots, produce the titles, market them, share them with other platforms, and keep the Cloud for gamers running at peak performance. Microsoft wins that way.
