I'd be surprised if there was freedom. Xbox has been given money because MS sees the division as being able to push their hybrid computing initiative. That initiative is a seamless computing experience that is part cloud and part local hardware, and customers will pay for it on an ongoing basis; this is true from the OS division to the cloud to the office to the gaming. It is bullshit to think that xbox has been given money because Nadella and the board of billionaires are gamers (fucking LOOOOOOOOL) and all they care about is giving developers freedom. No, they want xbox to be a driver of hybrid subscription computing.
Eery studio will have to push in that direction. What kind of games will help push in that direction?
- they must be streamable, so games that are fine with 125-150ms of latency. which means loose controls but you can play them on very low end hardware
[*]must be able to be run locally so that they look good, thus keeping the enthusiasts engaged. I believe MS won't have any problem having a $600 or even a $700 machine to go along with their $100 to $150 base box if Sony releases a $500 machine. So the big games at least, will always look best on MS' top end box.
- MS Studios is THE gamepass driver, and since MS is all about recurring revenue and subs for ALL their products, they will not make games that do not drive gamepass sales. Every game will be Gaas.
- There must be revenue from ingame transactions, and in 2019 and beyond this means cosmetics. Cosmetic transactions only work in a social setting, because humans are only motivated in a social context by that kind of thing. Nobody dresses up, puts on jewelry, applies makeup etc to eat dinner by themselves in their home. So, you are looking at multiplayer as core to everything.
So what kind of games will be made? I think we only need to look at current trends. Bethesda just made Fallout 76 which would be exactly what Microsoft would want. Blizzard is positioning DIV to be an mmo-lite, always connected experience. Bungie is 100% this kind of studio now. Sea of Thieves is that kind of game. Ubisoft's most successful games are these kind. There are more examples of course.
Now this doesn't mean everything will be 100% that way. Rockstar has shown that having a premier single player experience in gtaV can create enormous GaaS success in what is essentially separate multiplayer game. So, I don't think something like the next Halo will be only multiplayer. But, I feel confident in saying that every studio will be GaaS centric, and their focus will be on always online multiplayer, and single player will only be important insofar as it helps with that.
This very well might be a winning strategy. The most successful games with the most passionate communities are exactly these kinds of games. The biggest money earners are League of Legends, WoW, Overwatch, Hearthstone, Minecraft, GTAO, PokemonGO, Call of Duty, PUBG, Fortnite, Monster Stike, Clash of Clans, Destiny, FiFa, Madden, etc.
The other two platform holders have nothing like the above (pokemongo is not a Switch game), iirc. So, this really could be a winning strategy for microsoft. In fact, if it works out, they might even use it to restart their mobile division. There are many people who would buy a phone if it was a place to play their favorite GaaS game. Apple's gaming strategy is strait up garbage as they literally invest nothing in gaming and just skim money off microtransactions in exploitative games from other companies. And if the hybrid experience extends to having full featured cloud versions of desktop apps that integrate seamlessly with people's PCs, it could make a microsoft phone super useful versus Apple's frustrating anit-productivity ios environment.