Sure, but at this point, Windows is the default option regardless of whether MS supports PC gaming. I seriously doubt Windows sales have increased since MS returned to Steam and launched PC Game Pass. Everybody has already been using Windows for about 30 years.

Probably not a dozen but 2 or 3? Definitely. We already see that in the film/TV streaming market.

The question is whether the added revenue would justify the costs. GPUs are larger and more expensive than ever before so making a capable gaming PC with a convenient, living room-friendly form factor would be very costly. To compete with PS5/XSX, they’d have to sell the console at a significant loss that would take…

There are some who prefer the Xbox gamepad, the XBL interface, features like Quick Resume and cross-buy/play, etc.

If you have a beefy PC, you can already play Starfield and will be able to play Indy too.

Nobody is buying Windows just to play PC games. MS has a monopoly in the PC OS market so Windows is the default OS. People would buy it regardless (or more likely have it pre-installed on their prebuilt PC). This would remain true even if MS largely abandoned PC gaming (like they did during the original Xbox and 360…

Most players don’t even finish, let alone replay their games so I don’t think ownership is as important as a many people seem to think. If a subscription service has a sufficiently large selection of popular games and is convenient and well-priced, I think its potential growth is really high.

PC is definitely an afterthought for Sony, so I’m not sure I’d call it much of a change in their overall business strategy. They still aren’t going to release games on Xbox and Switch which are their primary competition.

To be fair, console users have been getting screwed ever since MS started charging for multiplayer access like 20 years ago and the other platforms followed suit. The fact that this is still a thing in 2024 is pretty crazy.

The acquisitions alone won’t impact GP’s growth. The output of the acquired studios is what will impact GP’s growth. So far, the output hasn’t been strong enough to make a big difference. Redfall bombed, Starfield was underwhelming, HiFi Rush and Pentiment were good but had zero hype, etc. We’ll see how Avowed,…

I’m not sure what you’re assuming but there are some legitimate concerns about Xbox leaving the hardware business. Some people really enjoy the Xbox hardware and don’t want to see it disappear. The concern is less “no more Xbox exclusives” and more “no more Xbox.”

This isn’t the end of exclusivity. This is (potentially) the end of MS exclusivity. Sony will continue doing exclusives into perpetuity because it’s been working for them and they have no reason to change unless their market share starts to drop.

Scalability is going to be a huge issue if streaming games ever becomes popular. Nobody wants to wait more than a minute to play their games and the actual experience of playing said games will get worse the more people are using the service.

I doubt Sony’s decision to port their games to PC has anything to do with MS. MS is in a distant third place when it comes to console market share. Sony likely just decided that ports are cheap enough that delayed PC releases would be easy profit without cannibalizing sales on PS.

That’s not really true. EA Play is allowed on PSN, for example, and Game Pass will always be allowed on PC. There’s also the streaming market. If MS can get Game Pass streaming on popular smart TVs and mobile devices, that’s another potentially big market right there.

Availability is a choice factor. If a game is available on three platforms, I have three choices of where to play said game. If a game is available on only one platform, I only have one choice. This is basic math.

I’m saying, and have said multiple times, that it doesn’t matter if it would or could have been released on multiple platforms.

Input lag was less of a problem for me. The main problem was the amount of compression artifacts in the image. It just looked real bad on both my TV and monitor. Probably less noticeable on a phone.

So in other words, you’re ignoring 20 years of historical precedent because your entire arguments rests on games not being multiplatform by default.

I don’t see Valve bothering to break into the living room console market. Doing so would be incredibly expensive with low chances of success. Steam continues to break user records and has shown constant growth for like 20 years so they really don’t need the console market.