They still don’t have the one thing that matters, games.
I don’t respect their acquisitions and as a result will vote with my wallet. Xbox gamers aren’t getting more games PlayStation gamers are just getting less. Sony’s first party line up isn’t a result of them swinging their dick around, for the most part at least, it’s the result of slow acquisitions and organic growth with tons of risk taking. Not getting to play the next elder scrolls with the features of the dual sense is a shame. The list of studios they bought is puzzling after you move past the huge names and the rumors of most of the devs they bought expanding to multiple teams despite many of them barely being efficient with one is a great recipe for disaster.
Having the most powerful hardware and the weakest hardware (by a considerably larger amount) at the same is another perfect example of Microsoft’s shit decision making. All that juice but their devs will be bogged down having to ensure their games play the on the s at acceptable levels? Stupid. Plus we’ve yet to see that power advantage come to fruition. Most games run either identical or in many cases better on the ps5. Most of the examples of games running better on the x feel like they are glorified bc games taking advantage of the power gap between the ps pro and one x rather than the ps5 and series x.
Gamepass is cool but I’ve always played a variety of games and know what I like. Between used games, the instant ps plus collection, the knock out monthly ps plus offerings, and the almost constant sales on the PlayStation store I think it’s really overestimated how much some of us would save on gamepass.
To answer your last point, no I don’t think they have a clear plan. I think they are throwing massive amounts of money in an effort to become the literal Netflix of games. It’s not that hard when you have limitless money to burn. 23 million subs is a good amount in 4 years but then what? It’s still not profitable. Eventually there will be direct competition. What happens when they hit the end point of Xbox owners willing to pay for gamepass? Their service isn’t booming on pc nearly as hard. Go full streaming? Why not just go full third party at that point?