Microsoft reflects 1980s American business culture: the production and sales of physical products are less important than the promotion of image and the speculation of stock. So as long as shareholders are happy with the Xbox brand, and it is a brand that sticks in the public imagination then Xbox will stay around. Rationalization is an inherent part of this culture: why spend the capital to produce physical consoles and games when you can generate the same revenues through delivering games via the internet? Hence why Xbox is moving towards a games service provider model (Xbox game pass, ending exclusivity) rather than console producer model. As long as the brand Xbox sticks in people's mind, no matter whether an Xbox is a physical console or an online service, Microsoft will keep it as a division, because it is something marketable that they can show to their major shareholders at board meetings and keep their share price high.
Why the hell does the Xbox even exist anymore...
I've owned all Xbox consoles and enjoyed the first two. I gotta admit, this time around it's mainly because my friends all have an X1 as well. I'm really hopeful for next gen, because otherwise I may have to jump ship, and I can really only afford one console. I would build another PC but getting my bros to actually consistently get on PC is a pain in the ass.
They've made a lot of good strides. One of the reasons I bought an X1 is because I picked up a PS3 after having a 360 for a few years, and the online was just god awful. Like, all this shit I took for granted. Maybe PS4 has improved in this regard since you have to pay for it now, don't know.
X1 has some neat ideas, some bells and whistles. They've bought all those game studios. All this BC is great. But in the end, if you don't have games, you're shit out of luck. They'd better bring the games. I loved Halo, but 343i fucking sucks and they've run a great franchise into the ground. Never big on Gears. I wish they hadn't cancelled Scalebound.
I don't know. I feel like Mattrick really, really shit the bed this gen. The reason I didn't grab an X1 at launch is because I have not and will not ever be interested in motion control gimmickry. It fucking sucks and is patently inferior to just pushing a button. Thankfully they ditched the 100 dollar brick. This gen is a wash for them no doubt. Hopefully Phil can at least swing for the fences next gen.
This generation of consoles was awful. Extremely underpowered hardware, the CPUs were literally designed for tablets but were so bad no one used them in mobile devices. Most of the downsides of PCs, buggy games that need patches, crashes and glitches. Both console and PC gaming are in a pretty bad state, nvidia monopoly is driving PC costs outrageously high and they actively sabotage performance to sell GPUs. Windows 10 is a dumpster fire, devs refuse to use vulkan instead of dx11.
or you can hope crossplatform playing is becoming more of a thing and u cna just play on whatever platform with your friends (maybe beside sony since it doesn't look like they care much about it)