Billions might be puffery talk. Or a nice way to say we want to dominate the entire industry across the planet.
Another poster has brought up the office. Cant buy it anymore. Why? Because the company that owns GP once decided Office would be subs only going forward.
Now imagine they keep buying big pubs. Once consolidated and 10 yr deals (or whatever) run out, they say no more competitor platforms. Give that a few years, decrease options elsewhere, and then tell everyone subs only from now on. Where’s the consumer going to go?
Key difference here - Office was already the monopoly marketshare leader in enterprise software/services *before* they turned office into a sub service. There were almost no viable competitors operating in that arena, although right now, GSuite is eating up quite a bit of their pie, and they offer out office services for free even. And as far as big pubs are concerned, its pretty clear based on what we're seeing with the CMA/FTC/EU that they probably, at most, are only going to get away with purchasing one more big pub and thats it.
Also, the big pubs we primarily are talking about all operate, like I said in my original post, in core gaming - console/PC games with AA/AAA budgets. The majority of revenue coming in from gaming, and the overwhelming larger slice of the user pie, is currently in mobile, something that GamePass doesn't offer any incentive for. The consumer has plenty of places to go - Sony is going anywhere, and if we enter a scenario where MS is allowed to just consolidated while uncontested, Sony will also move to massively expand their production output and maintain their position (From/Capcom/SE will all get bought if Sony has to).
These two situations (office/GP) are nowhere near close enough. GP's scope and potential userbase is infinitely more limited than Office, its never been in a market dominant position as Office has been, and Office has never had to operate deep in the red in order for it to sustain itself, which GP currently (and for the foreseeable future) does.
No clue. If I had to guess, cloud and mobile would be how they get their. Regardless, it's a future Microsoft is pursuing and the way they're pursuing it is through content acquisition.
Again, no idea how you convince a mobile user to sub to GP, but nothing either in their slate, or what they'd potentially get from ATVI would move that needle. They don't even have a GP app on the App/Play Store, let alone any meaningful way to put out a Mobile GP tier without having to shell out a cut to Apple/Google, a cut which is currently what is preventing GP from being pushed onto Steam/PSN.
Current analysis i've seen pegs the core gaming audience somewhere around 200-300m users, and thats including Nintendo and Steam in the mix. The larger issue with core gaming is that its user demo has been steadily getting older, and although Nintendo is bringing in a significant number of new users on the young-side of the spectrum, as those users have gotten older, they routinely go into mobile gaming primarily, with some core games coming up as a secondary gaming interest for them. That isn't to say that core games is in anyway doomed, since the revenue this userbase can generate is still unbelievable, and has only gone up as this demo has aged and their disposable income has increased.
As for Cloud - while some analysts continue suggesting that Cloud will become the defacto standard for the core games industry, there has simply never been some market indicator that its being adopted or generating profit. For MS, it makes sense cause it bolsters their Azure vertical integration and serves as a nice test bed for the cloud suite, but as far as a userbase is concerned, Cloud simply may as well not exist.