Yeah, Sticking to its strength which is first party, first party, and first party is probably Sony's best bet. I said something similar earlier in the day. That they need to double down on first party and go on a massive hiring spree, but now im not sure if the parent Sony will give them the budget boost they need. But we shall see.
And I think I was talking to
@James Sawyer Ford about this earlier, but you nailed it on the head there with this purchase being used to get Sony to put gamepass on Playstation. There is definitely more to this $70 billion purchase than just getting CoD on xbox consoles. CoD makes maybe $2-3 billion a year. Activision in total made $8 billion last year. This move will take almost 10 years to pay off unless the idea was to pressure Sony into putting gamepass on playstation. No better game to hold as hostage than CoD. They know Sony cant live without CoD, and MS knows they need Sony's 100 million userbase to make gamepass successful.
I completely agree that MS no longer cares about consoles. I bet once they get gamepass on Nintendo and Playstation consoles they would leave the xbox console business altogether. One of the MS execs at the Apple/Epic trial confirmed that they have never made money off of console sales. Ever. So the services model that has made them so successful under the Satya leadership is what they are going for, and in order to get 200 million users like Netflix, they need access to the switch and PS userbases.
Very good point. My friend said earlier that they might put xcloud on the switch since it doesnt have the hardware to run next gen games. It will be interesting to see if Nintendo is stubborn enough to reject that enticing offer.