Well, I think they'd better
hope it does, at least. Phil was asked why Quantum Break and Scalebound weren't sim-shipping on PC, and he basically said they should've been, but they didn't realize the Bone wouldn't really be exclusive-viable until it was too late. Phil said he didn't feel it was fair to the teams to make their exclusive game multi-platform in the middle of development, and I agree, so kudos to him for not making them do it anyway.
Same goes for Halo 5, but more so, since it was even further in to development. I'm sure they're already porting it to W10 to try to recoup some of their development costs, and if it does well there, I've no doubt H6 will sim-ship. If it
doesn't do well there, I wouldn't expect an H6 at all.
Yes, we will start seeing smaller, F2P games from MS because Nadella is keeping XBox around to assist with their mobile efforts; "small games" (read: "mobile games") is the reason XBox still exists at all. That said, Phil doesn't really have any teams geared towards mobile development; he has a handful of AAA teams. So in the long term, he's going to be building tons of mobile teams to see what sticks, and in the short term, he'll try to please his boss with his existing teams by using them to help shore up Windows proper.
So let me ask you, why would they keep Gears console-exclusive, even if it
was a financially viable option? What do they gain by funneling people away from Windows and towards the console? If anything, they want to funnel users in the
other direction.