honestly you wrote lots (LOTS) of wrong things and lots of unlikely assumptions
Honestly you have no idea how servers and cloud works.
I don't know in what reality you can compare the servers owned by Sony acquired with the small Onlive
Stop mading up nonsensical stuff. The onlive servers had nothing to do with the PS Now ones. The PS Now ones did use PS3 hardware embedded in server racks to run and stream PS3. Later they made a newer versions that were using PS4 hardware to run PS4 games. If fact Sony already had their technology build by the Gaikai team, they basically only got some game streaming patents Onlive had.
with what is Azure and Xbox has available with Xcloud. They are these investments behind such an infrastructure are so huge that I don't think Sony could grant them for the PlayStation division at the moment and in the near future.
Xcloud is only MS's version of PS Now, it doesn't add anything special to their streaming tech and the MS infrastructure doesn't add anything that Sony already had before.
And you will understand for yourself that renting servers definitely costs X times more than owning them and being able to make money on them (check the earnings of azure and Xcloud expense)
I worked in a very successful F2P company with games that had many dozens of millions of users and we rented servers and have friends and former coworkes now working in the biggest mobile F2P companies of the work. So I know the costs of owning, mantaining and renting servers. And I also know that companies like MS, Sony, Amazon, Facebook, Google and thousands more with big services have their own servers and on top of that most of the servers they use aren't owned by them, but are datacenters spread around the world 'rented' in 3rd party data center companies who work at the same time for MS, Azure, AWS, Google, Facebook, Sony, EA and any random webiste, app service or whoever else wants to pay for it.
People use 3rd party data centers because they cover more countries and cities and are cheaper than to rent them to Azure or ASW, or own them yourself because they share cost between more apps/services/webs and cut middleman costs. And obviously they offer basically the same. The cost for their internet and electricity usage plus maintenance is pretty much the same for everyone, mostly depends on the country. And the hardware for PS Now servers is a custom one made by Sony.
Azure only is a software to manage this cloud of servers, as Amazon AWS and many other ones are. The cost of that license is a tiny portion of running the whole game streaming business. What Sony pays yearly for that is way smaller than what MS spends on getting 3rd party and indie games that debut on a month of game pass to name an example, and this is without considering what MS sacrifices in game sales for their 1st party games putting them there day one.
Psnow which was an acquisition for Sony (gaikai+onlive), in view of the future that is starting in this days, is a commercial failure from all points of view it was so bad that Sony herself took the app off its televisions because it couldn't even guarantee access to the service in the vast majority of cities. It is (a failure) also from the point of view of number of users. For this I bet that within this gen we will see a rebrand and a relaunch under another name.
If it's a failure why MS copied it? And why Sony makes more money with their game subscriptions strategy and has more subscribers than MS without needing to throw billions to it and to sacrifice many dozens of millions of day one game sales? And why Sony's strategy of focusing on selling their games and to keep as secondary businesss the subscriptions to include there mostly the games that already sold all their copies generates them way more money as division?
In terms of users, how many Xcloud users are there? Do you know them? Or at least do you know the users of GP Ultimate also including the ones who don't use Xcloud? And do you know that Xcloud is also limited to some countries like PS Now instead of having a global coverage?
Ms does not take money for any software sold on PC (unless there is some copyright for some stuff that it makes money behind the scenes as it happens onevery device sold with Android on) but the Windows platform is theirs and then decides what DirectX support and what not and who decides which API to push (directstorage say something?) or deprecate and if that's not enough you will find only one store and advertising integrated into the operating system and it will only be Xbox in fact we have Gamepass integration inside windows 11.
There is no reason for MS to block Sony or anyone else for using DirectX on PC or something like that. If fact MS wants to have everyone using their APIs instead of alternatives like Vulkan. In fact Sony doesn't use DirectX at all on their PlayStations. Regarding the MS store being integrated in Windows doesn't matter if almost everybody use other ones like Steam, GoG or Epic Store instead.
So 2 million additional sales.
Yup. I don't know the current exact sales, but as of now they should be ~2M units sold in PC + ~15?M units sold + some millions more who played it on PS Plus/PS Now/Play at Home/etc.