Spencer said in no uncertain terms that Microsoft could exit the gaming business if this projection became reality. Microsoft needs the light green and blue segments (PC and cloud) to get much larger and much faster by fiscal year 2027, or it could opt out of the business altogether.
I do not believe that that is what the future Xbox business would look like. This is a presentation from our devices organization to the gaming leadership team, so this is the view from the team that is chartered with building our hardware on what the future business would look like.
I can fairly safely say that if we do not make more progress than this off of console, we would exit the gaming business. If this were the outcome, we would – I don’t believe we’d still be in the business.
A majority of our customers are found off of our own hardware, I would hope by earlier than 2030. So, when you asked me if I agreed with this chart that the light green and blue depending on what colors you see there would have to be much larger much earlier. I would say by FY26, '27 that we should be in that position, or we’d have to make a different decision with the business.
I would rather it all die and force back to disks, or at least some guarantee you actually own the game.
All these services are going to become endlessly tiered with eventual extra dlc costs. They know most gamers spend $300 a year on games. So if Gamepass takes off, expect the base option to eventually be $15 a month, with tiers up to $40, maybe higher… who knows what whales will spend, especially if they throw in currency bonuses.
Then they will add in some in store currency and give the highest subscriber tiers extra Boxbux to spend on DLC… or probably literally loot boxes.
It would be neat to see support for a universal digital library system. Where it can only be checked to one person. If you want to sell the game, you uninstall and it provides you with a token number it generates. That unique number is tied to the copy of the game. You sell the token number, they now own the game. If they ever uninstall it, they get a new number to trade. Or libraries could lend them for free using the same system.
Kinda of like a game NFT that tied into some DRM allowing ownership of a license. And the reason it should be distributed, is to not trust any single organization.
As of today, I would trust steam entirely, to do the right thing, with game reselling and so forth. But soon as Gabe dies, and somebody else takes over steam, we’re going to lose that trust. Gabe is a benevolent dictator, but his succession plan has no guarantees.
So the way I would envision it working is it gets registered into your ecosystem. So if you want to resell a game, that’s fine Xbox or Sony will take a cut if you So it in their ecosystem… but they couldn’t force you to do that. They would always have to allow you to take it out of their ecosystem as a code for whatever the consumer wants to do with it. They would probably post huge warnings like “if you do this, you could lose your game forever if you lose this code or if someone steals it”, but at least allow the option.
I think it would work out well. Most people wouldn’t bother taking it out of the ecosystem, and those that truly care could.
And yes blockchain tech would be a good way to manage it, but the word “blockchain” seems to get people riled up these days.
