But buying up studios and releasing niche expensive hardware just because IS throwing money around. That's what I'm getting at.
In a way, I'm the audience Microsoft is losing. I own an S, not an X and I won't buy an X because it'll be dead too soon to justify the cost (although the backwards compatibility stuff looks awesome). I'm not happy with where the S is, and as an S owner, which is what makes up the vast majority of Xbox owners wordwide, how did the X do anything except further alienate someone who already dedicated hundreds of dollars on hardware? In fact, for some, they'd already replaced one Xbox console this generation with the S, and now Microsoft release another system. It's very bad optics. The message it sends is that they wanted to speak to the hardcore, 4k owning crowd, but that crowd is small compared to who actually buys most of the consoles that get sold. Some in this thread have posited that Microsoft (to go back to my baseball analogy) isn't even interested in winning the world series, but that's horse shit. All companies are in it to win. You don't buy software houses and release expensive hardware revisions just because. The S has been struggling and Microsoft's answer was to release an expensive 4k option and a "the games are coming" message? That doesn't cut it. To most of the world, the Xbox is still represented by the experience one gets from the S -- that's the experience the vast majority of the people are having with the Xbox name. On this forum, it seems people view the X as a symbol to the world that Microsoft is righting the ship, but to me, all it did was make me more indifferent. The X doesn't hurt or help my circumstance with the Xbox. It doesn't make me play it less, but it doesn't make me play it more, either. I've played with a lot of analogies, but Microsoft focusing on the X so heavily has been like someone stitching a cut on their thumb while ignoring that their leg has been lopped off by a hay sickle.
Being critical of the Xbox is well-earned and deserved in my opinion, and while some of it is trolling, most isn't. A lot of it is grounded in how disgruntled people are with the direction of the company and to us S owners, the X didn't change that. In fact, the message it sent me, loud and clear, was NOT to buy an Xbox at launch, because they'll be releasing a more powerful revision a few years in and they'll focus on that.