@girlusocrazy: Yup. Been saying it for years: Nadella has never, ever been more than lukewarm on gaming, period. I think he'd be cold to gamepass, too, save for the fact it's cloud based and he loves himself some cloud.
People are going to knock ol' Phil for all of this, but I have a feeling this would've happened long, long ago but for Phil being in Nadella's ear talking about the positives of gaming. It'll be sad to see XBox fans turn on him. He doesn't deserve it.
@USDevilDog: It's going to be hard to see there being no such thing as XBox. It's too valuable a trademark for MS to just put it out to pasture and let it fade away. You have to figure that either MS continues to make the thing or they do what the rumors had them doing before: either selling it outright or licensing the manufacture to someone else. I could see a world where you can play "Microsoft Game Pass" on your Sony Playstation, your PC or your Samsung (or something) XBox. That wouldn't necessarily be such a bad thing.
@girlusocrazy: There's also the fact that MS, with the exception of XBox has never been a gizmo company. They don't make phones, TVs, consumer electronics, etc. They had a tablet once, right? That went nowhere.
Sony, on the other hand, has been selling gizmos since forever. The house the Walkman built. Nintendo has been selling consoles and handhelds since forever.
XBox has always been an oddity: a successful gizmo made by a software company. As MS is, and always has been, a software company, maybe the migration of MS gaming to the cloud and gamepass and whatnot was inevitable at the start.
I mean, hell, wasn't there some rumor that, what, six, seven years ago MS was going to spin off Xbox entirely? People speculating what would be a good fit, and Samsung, a gizmo company, kept coming up.
@gatsbythepig: Well, I wouldn't go THAT far. MS has never been a video game company. They've been a big company that does a lot of things, one of which is games. Really, for the last ten years, Nadella hasn't been all that gung ho about games, certainly not as much as Steve Ballmer was back in the day.
MS does love its cloud tech, though, and Gamepass seems to be the game...thing...that ties into something Nadella and the rest of the non game parts of MS really care about. This pivot might be the thing that makes MS's leadership (almost) as gung ho about games as Ballmer was, but MS will never be entertainment first and foremost.
@ceelogreen94: Yes, youtube is free. Law school is not, and, as someone who paid for that, really, if it was that easy to make billions there'd be no capitalism.
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