Game Streaming Platforms and Technology (xCloud, PSNow, GeforceNow, Luna) (Rip: Stadia)

[liams]

Sony is more like HBO.

Agreed, but which has more subscribers, HBO max or Netflix?

I believe they did that for PS5 release.

Agreed, gets people excited about PlayStation as a brand in the lead up to the console release, conveniently overpainting the honestly fairly 'meh' 2019 for PlayStation

Not to mention it is not available on PS. It seems in general Xbox has more success in service and online games. The thing is Xbox has always been PC-lite or something with the similar gaming preferences. It might help with the emergent markets though, unlike established ones.

Yeah, I think the whole unified dev environment with GDK, while maybe causing some teething issues now will pay off for xbox in the end. I could see the 'GDK' becoming the lead platform in preference to PlayStation, just because the addressable market you get when making a GDK game is larger than PlayStation will ever be. According to 'Newzoo' who is a market research company apparently, there are 1.2 Billion games who play on pc, a very optimistic number, but xbox+xcloud+pc dwarfs whatever number of ps5's that PlayStation can ever dream of selling.


With the emerging markets thing, I completely agree! in the latest sea of thieves update that they did they said they were seeing strong growth in China and Korea. Another aspect of gaas games that make them perfect for emergent markets is that its a much lower investment to produce regional content. It wouldn't cost much to add a bunch of region-specific skins in sea of thieves specifically for the Korean or Chinese region for example. On that front I expect Microsoft to partner more heavily with NetEase, expanding their existing relationship they already have with Minecraft, to start producing this region-specific content. You could add Chinese car brands to forza for instance, things like that.



article on Newzoo gamer breakdown
https://venturebeat.com/2020/05/08/newzoo-2-7-billion-gamers-will-spend-159-3-billion-on-games-in-2020/#:~:text=PC gaming,attributed to the lockdown measures.

 

[ChuckeRearmed]

Agreed, but which has more subscribers, HBO max or Netflix?

Of course Netflix, the thing though HBO is not available in a lot of countries. It will be interesting to see how it will work out when it is available in more regions. I believe the biggest ones are Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+.

Yeah, I think the whole unified dev environment with GDK, while maybe causing some teething issues now will pay off for xbox in the end. I could see the 'GDK' becoming the lead platform in preference to PlayStation, just because the addressable market you get when making a GDK game is larger than PlayStation will ever be. According to 'Newzoo' who is a market research company apparently, there are 1.2 Billion games who play on pc, a very optimistic number, but xbox+xcloud+pc dwarfs whatever number of ps5's that PlayStation can ever dream of sellin

Personally the perfect scenario if the developers switch to GDK and thus each PC game might get Xbox port + XCloud support. It would be the best case scenario. After all if it does not require a lot of time to port the game to Xbox/XCloud devs might just do it.

With the emerging markets thing, I completely agree! in the latest sea of thieves update that they did they said they were seeing strong growth in China and Korea. Another aspect of gaas games that make them perfect for emergent markets is that its a much lower investment to produce regional content. It wouldn't cost much to add a bunch of region-specific skins in sea of thieves specifically for the Korean or Chinese region for example. On that front I expect Microsoft to partner more heavily with NetEase, expanding their existing relationship they already have with Minecraft, to start producing this region-specific content. You could add Chinese car brands to forza for instance, things like that.

I feel like emergent markets are purely mobile and PC-centric and the reason for that is that PC as well as mobile are the must for the normal life - for the work, study, development. People buy mobiles and PCs (laptops) first, then they buy consoles. And if they have the subscription service - they might not even buy a console. Also it seems like emergent markets are very GaaS centric too and multiplayer games are very popular (if they are done right) there.

Sony is also making moves in China too though. Also I am curious about Nintendo but it lives in its own world.

 

[eastmen]

PSnow already exists, and the only thing stopping it from becoming gamepass ultimate is the Sony games being too financially successful.
For gamepass ultimate to become market leader in streaming games, MS needs to rely on Sony continuing to produce hit after hit.

or sony is afraid to change their business model to something more successful. While talking about Netflix so much remember when Netflix offered to sell itself to blockbuster a then juggernaut rental company because blockbuster didn't want to change their lucrative business model. By the time block buster launched their own mail in service netflix again jumped ahead with streaming and block buster was a dead company in what a decade ?

 

[Johnny Awesome]

I get the feeling that MS plans to hit the full gamut of gameplay experienced with their 35+ dev teams (23 studios), not just GAAS games. Acquisitions aren't over yet either IMO.

Sea of Thieves content, Forza Horizon 4 content, Gears Tactics, Minecraft Dungeons, Battletoads, Ori WotW, Wasteland 3, and Call of the Sea is a decent amount of variety, and they're working towards at least twice that 1st party content annually for GamePass.

I'm not even counting all the 3rd party goodness like Dragon Quest XI, Control, Jedi Fallen Order etc....

 

[ChuckeRearmed]

I'm not even counting all the 3rd party goodness like Dragon Quest XI, Control, Jedi Fallen Order etc....

Also I believe it is a good options for third parties to dump various older projects into GamePass too, because it may entice other people to try the game or even buy and might bring more subscribers too. At the same time it costs nothing for the third party.

 

[liams]

Of course Netflix, the thing though HBO is not available in a lot of countries. It will be interesting to see how it will work out when it is available in more regions. I believe the biggest ones are Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+.

It will be interesting, I would say, as someone who has lived in the US and currently lives elsewhere, HBO is nothing internationally, most people have no idea what it is. Sure they might have some series that are known internationally, but they seem to partner with local content distributors a lot, so you wouldn't think of HBO when watching their content. For example, and its probably the weakest example, is in the UK Game of thrones was shown on the various SKY channels, people don't tune in to the HBO channel. In fact, just looking up what series HBO make, I didn't know they do Westworld. I really don't see HBO max getting big internationally, to much content that is really America centric.

Personally the perfect scenario if the developers switch to GDK and thus each PC game might get Xbox port + XCloud support. It would be the best case scenario. After all if it does not require a lot of time to port the game to Xbox/XCloud devs might just do it.

agreed! I think the real measure of success, and I don't know if Microsoft is planning to do this, is when 3rd party publishers can sell streaming versions of their game on phones, switch, etc, that's just the xbox version running in xcloud, maybe with device-specific UI's but nothing beyond that. I could see this being incredibly attractive to the Ubisofts and EAs of the world, make a GDK version? well you have a sellable product, (including streaming), on windows, xbox, switch, android, ios, iPad, hell pretty much anything but PlayStation.

I wonder what the implications for the small number of games that get ported to iOS will be, if all that work can be skipped just by streaming it I would imagine devs wont bother.

I feel like emergent markets are purely mobile and PC-centric and the reason for that is that PC as well as mobile are the must for the normal life - for the work, study, development. People buy mobiles and PCs (laptops) first, then they buy consoles. And if they have the subscription service - they might not even buy a console. Also it seems like emergent markets are very GaaS centric too and multiplayer games are very popular (if they are done right) there.

Yup! And you already see some of this influencing xbox already, quick resume, I think, was developed for xcloud, at least in part. Being able to have games that you can quickly resume when your streaming to someone on a commute is crucial. If you've got 5 minutes to play a game its no fun if you have to wait 2 minutes to get back to the exact same spot you left off. Its also helpful for being instantly able to drop a game too obviously, close the xcloud app? no problem you haven't lost anything.

Sony is also making moves in China too though. Also I am curious about Nintendo but it lives in its own world.

Nintendo will outlast everyone in gaming maybe eventually they will buy Microsoft to improve Nintendo online

 

[liams]

or sony is afraid to change their business model to something more successful. While talking about Netflix so much remember when Netflix offered to sell itself to blockbuster a then juggernaut rental company because blockbuster didn't want to change their lucrative business model. By the time block buster launched their own mail in service netflix again jumped ahead with streaming and block buster was a dead company in what a decade ?

With sony not turning PSnow into a direct gamepass competitor, I don't think they want to get into a content pissing match with a committed Microsoft, sure they might have the best content, but if push came to shove, Microsoft would have a lot more of it. They also have less avenues to sell PSnow, sure you can stream to pc but no one on pc would choose to stream a game over running it natively if they had the option. I would be really interested to see the game pass subscriptions split between console and PC, and I'm wondering which is giving them the most growth right now.

 

[BRiT]

It will be interesting, I would say, as someone who has lived in the US and currently lives elsewhere, HBO is nothing internationally, most people have no idea what it is. Sure they might have some series that are known internationally, but they seem to partner with local content distributors a lot, so you wouldn't think of HBO when watching their content. For example, and its probably the weakest example, is in the UK Game of thrones was shown on the various SKY channels, people don't tune in to the HBO channel. In fact, just looking up what series HBO make, I didn't know they do Westworld. I really don't see HBO max getting big internationally, to much content that is really America centric.

It still remains to be seen when/if HBO (and Warner Media) implodes because of AT&T management.

For as large of a streaming product as HBO Max should be, they've had rather anemic uptake. It's because they thought they didn't need to make their product available on 70% of the streaming hardware market -- entirely skip Amazon Fire TV and Roku hardware. They just reached a deal to get onto Fire TV devices but then they've pulled HBO from Amazon Channels entirely and forcing users to use standalone HBOMax application. They're still no deal in sight with Roku. Management

Another bad management decision is the push towards quantity instead of quality for HBO branded content. This will devalue the brand given enough time. It will no longer be seen as premium content in the USA, but instead be "oh, it's like media from The CW or TBS/TNT". The CW is the network partially owned with CBs (now ViacomCBS) that produces shows like Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow, Arrow, The Flash, Black Lightning. Gone are the days of higher quality content like The Newsroom, Deadwood, Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire, The Wire, or Entourage.

Anyways, that's my little take on HBO from a Midwest US perspective.

I also think Nintendo will outlast everyone. They don't take risks and have a captive audience that will repurchase the same IP many times over.

 

[liams]

It still remains to be seen when/if HBO (and Warner Media) implodes because of AT&T management.

For as large of a streaming product as HBO Max should be, they've had rather anemic uptake. It's because they thought they didn't need to make their product available on 70% of the streaming hardware market -- entirely skip Amazon Fire TV and Roku hardware. They just reached a deal to get onto Fire TV devices but then they've pulled HBO from Amazon Channels entirely and forcing users to use standalone HBOMax application. They're still no deal in sight with Roku. Management

Another bad management decision is the push towards quantity instead of quality for HBO branded content. This will devalue the brand given enough time. It will no longer be seen as premium content in the USA, but instead be "oh, it's like media from The CW or TBS/TNT". The CW is the network partially owned with CBs (now ViacomCBS) that produces shows like Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow, Arrow, The Flash, Black Lightning. Gone are the days of higher quality content like The Newsroom, Deadwood, Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire, The Wire, or Entourage.

Anyways, that's my little take on HBO from a Midwest US perspective.

I also think Nintendo will outlast everyone. They don't take risks and have a captive audience that will repurchase the same IP many times over.

Yeah I think AT&T saw the writing on the wall with streaming content when they purchased warner media, but likely grossly underestimated how hard they would have to push content and how much investment it would need, they likely thought they could just slap something together and play with the big boys in the streaming wars. Up against Disney plus? imo they don't and never did, have a chance. The adding quantity that's not quality is probably all they could do, all the quality shows that people want to watch on streaming services are already under someone else's umbrella, and you cant pull a stranger things or star wars show out of your back pocket.

 

[ChuckeRearmed]

I also think Nintendo will outlast everyone. They don't take risks and have a captive audience that will repurchase the same IP many times over.

Well, unlike Sony, Nintendo were able to perfectly capture children and elderly. At least in Japan. And those groups are very loyal and not affected by trends that much.

As Japan tends to have modern trends earlier than other countries I believe on the west it will also eventually be children and elderly who play Nintendo.

 

[eastmen]

With sony not turning PSnow into a direct gamepass competitor, I don't think they want to get into a content pissing match with a committed Microsoft, sure they might have the best content, but if push came to shove, Microsoft would have a lot more of it. They also have less avenues to sell PSnow, sure you can stream to pc but no one on pc would choose to stream a game over running it natively if they had the option. I would be really interested to see the game pass subscriptions split between console and PC, and I'm wondering which is giving them the most growth right now.

You can't just snap your fingers and make a gamepass competitor it takes time just like it took time for gamepass to become what it is. I also disagree with them having the best content , its a matter of opinion and mine differs. The only game they released this year that I'm interested in is Demon souls which is a remake. For me the content MS released this year is of a much higher quality. Gears tactics , waste land 3 , age of empires and flight simulator are all best in genre games that released this year for microsoft.

I think the problem for sony is how long do you hold back your popular games from psnow ? At some point people will see the value of the subscription on game pass. Ms is going to keep adding studios and keep upping the amount of aaa games released to it each year. At some point people will start buying xss's because of game pass . I already know some die hard sony fans that have suggested to me that they would buy an ms console via all access when star field launches if it is exclusive to the xbox platform. I've even had a few more adventurous ask me about building pcs for it. MS wont care if the xbox is the second console in the home if it also comes with the subscription

etflix and Disney+ use them for their streaming services. The problem with MS for now is server coverage - AWS has much bigger amount of regions.

MS is quickly adding more and more coverage and will continue to do so into the future. This revenue has massively shifted over to resources that depend on that coverage.

Yeah I think AT&T saw the writing on the wall with streaming content when they purchased warner media, but likely grossly underestimated how hard they would have to push content and how much investment it would need, they likely thought they could just slap something together and play with the big boys in the streaming wars. Up against Disney plus? imo they don't and never did, have a chance. The adding quantity that's not quality is probably all they could do, all the quality shows that people want to watch on streaming services are already under someone else's umbrella, and you cant pull a stranger things or star wars show out of your back pocket.

WB's just had to many apps and content in to many places. They had the CW app where you'd watch shows that were on the tv channel next day but then netflix was a season behind with the same shows and well you want to watch DC shows ? Well some are exclusive to the DC app and oh HBO stuff is on he HBO app but also you can add it to prime oh and also hulu and so on.

Now ATT is putting it all under one streaming platform which will strengthen that streaming platform since its now getting all that content vs little pieces being handed off to both. I think its just going to take time for numbers to go up.

 

[liams]

You can't just snap your fingers and make a gamepass competitor it takes time just like it took time for gamepass to become what it is. I also disagree with them having the best content , its a matter of opinion and mine differs. The only game they released this year that I'm interested in is Demon souls which is a remake. For me the content MS released this year is of a much higher quality. Gears tactics , waste land 3 , age of empires and flight simulator are all best in genre games that released this year for microsoft.

I think the problem for sony is how long do you hold back your popular games from psnow ? At some point people will see the value of the subscription on game pass. Ms is going to keep adding studios and keep upping the amount of aaa games released to it each year. At some point people will start buying xss's because of game pass . I already know some die hard sony fans that have suggested to me that they would buy an ms console via all access when star field launches if it is exclusive to the xbox platform. I've even had a few more adventurous ask me about building pcs for it. MS wont care if the xbox is the second console in the home if it also comes with the subscription
.

Personally I agree with you about the games, Flight simulator was honestly my game of the decade, I have dreamt of an FSX successor since I was 13. I just meant in a how the larger gaming community perceives them kind of way.

I don't think sony will want to make a direct game pass competitor, because they will want to avoid direct comparisons between the two, in my opinion. I think they will add value to PS now, maybe in a years time expand the PS collection that they have talked about to include all the first party PS4 releases for example, but not include new ones on an ongoing basis. They might even cycle them in and out of the service, so you get god of war and spiderman this month, and the last of us and uncharted the next. I could see them adding things like Netflix to PSNow on a permanent basis, would be pretty funny seeing the PS5 fulfil the xbox one's ambitions.

I know sony and Microsoft have partnered for something PlayStation and azure related, and I am curious what it is, I would be surprised if its game streaming, but if it is that could be their answer, make essentially a PSP v2 and just stream everything to it. That way you get the cheaper entry point of the series s but with the brand recognition of playstation.

 

[ChuckeRearmed]

You can't just snap your fingers and make a gamepass competitor it takes time just like it took time for gamepass to become what it is. I also disagree with them having the best content , its a matter of opinion and mine differs. The only game they released this year that I'm interested in is Demon souls which is a remake. For me the content MS released this year is of a much higher quality. Gears tactics , waste land 3 , age of empires and flight simulator are all best in genre games that released this year for microsoft.

Well Xbox in general has more PC-centric content - all those games are basically the best on PC or can be played just as good.
But Sony is a platform for third person action games, which you don't usually have on PC. Anecdotally I play only State of Decay and GTA so it doesn't affect me.

They might even cycle them in and out of the service, so you get god of war and spiderman this month, and the last of us and uncharted the next.

But will it work though? PS community in general don't really like replaying older Sony games - I believe it is a due to pretty linear action-driven game loop. Funnily enough it is not the case for Xbox and Nintendo, because Xbox games are designed with replayability in mind and Nintendo has that too + they are relatively lightweight. Also Xbox games quite often have either multiplayer or coop. Older Sony games sell good on PC though, but I think it is because PC has been abandoned platform for third-person action games for a long time.

I know sony and Microsoft have partnered for something PlayStation and azure related, and I am curious what it is, I would be surprised if its game streaming, but if it is that could be their answer, make essentially a PSP v2 and just stream everything to it. That way you get the cheaper entry point of the series s but with the brand recognition of playstation.

MS currently is a leader in gaming cloud. Just like Amazon uses windows for Luna, Sony might as well use Azure for their streaming if needed.

 

[cheapchips]

MS currently is a leader in gaming cloud. Just like Amazon uses windows for Luna, Sony might as well use Azure for their streaming if needed.

Sony have plenty of server demands with just normal PS Network stuff before you get to the help videos and friend streaming parts of the PS5 UI. We shouldn't automatically assume it's for PSNow Turbo Edition.​

 

[liams]

MS currently is a leader in gaming cloud. Just like Amazon uses windows for Luna, Sony might as well use Azure for their streaming if needed.

Oh they undoubtable are, its just that sony would have to position ps5's in all of Microsoft data centres, which don't have the same non-gaming value that the xcloud blades have for running other services on them, that is unless they will make all the PlayStation exclusives playable of xbox, which would just be perfect.

Theres a lot of evidence that Microsoft is going to do per app streaming for desktop windows clients, which I would imagine will be released to coincide with the fullish rollout of the xcloud blades and then, following that the rollout of windows 10X. There is going to be lots of demand for xcloud blades I think.

I wonder what the ratio of subscribers of gamepass ultimate to installed xcloud blades per region is? It must be fairly high, especially with the same times of day being popular for gaming. 20:1?

 

[ChuckeRearmed]

Oh they undoubtable are, its just that sony would have to position ps5's in all of Microsoft data centres, which don't have the same non-gaming value that the xcloud blades have for running other services on them, that is unless they will make all the PlayStation exclusives playable of xbox, which would just be perfect.

MS. could provide some suggestions and info for building cloud infrastructure. I mean if Sony provides the hardware MS can build the servers if needed. And it doesn't imply that Xbox will get PS's games. I mean Netflix is using AWS, yet AWS has its own Amazon Prime Video.

Theres a lot of evidence that Microsoft is going to do per app streaming for desktop windows clients, which I would imagine will be released to coincide with the fullish rollout of the xcloud blades and then, following that the rollout of windows 10X. There is going to be lots of demand for xcloud blades I think.

Microsoft started to "embrace" a lot of interesting stuff these days even without cloud. I wonder if their WSL initiatives will drive support from Linux community and bring some people from Linux side. Not to mention their initiative (again) with Android apps.

I wonder what the ratio of subscribers of gamepass ultimate to installed xcloud blades per region is? It must be fairly high, especially with the same times of day being popular for gaming. 20:1?

I think the amount of GPU subscribers can be surprisingly high even without XCloud support, because it includes PC too.

 

[liams]

MS. could provide some suggestions and info for building cloud infrastructure. I mean if Sony provides the hardware MS can build the servers if needed. And it doesn't imply that Xbox will get PS's games. I mean Netflix is using AWS, yet AWS has its own Amazon Prime Video.

Oh, they certainly can put ps5 based server hardware out there. I meant that the number of people who play games varies wildly hour to hour, with peak times in the evening. If you cant use the PlayStation servers cant be used for azure functions more generally when there is less demand for game streaming its just wasted rack space. The only reason I think that xcloud makes sense to Microsoft is because they can use the xcloud blades for other revenue making purposes besides game streaming

Sony would have to rent the rack space at full whack, and wouldn't have the opportunity to use them for other things in a meaningful way.

What I meant by getting PlayStation games to run on xbox hardware I meant that the streaming versions of PlayStation games on PSNow might run on xcloud server blades, not retail releases.

Microsoft started to "embrace" a lot of interesting stuff these days even without cloud. I wonder if their WSL initiatives will drive support from Linux community and bring some people from Linux side. Not to mention their initiative (again) with Android apps.

I think a lot of things like WSL are to reduce the cons list to windows, is how I would put it. If your a dev who uses Linux tools but likes office what do you do? without WSL being a thing you have to either dual boot or go full Linux then use something like OpenOffice. Its also part of their cloud push, a lot of azure customers use Linux in their servers, streamlining the dev experience on windows further entrenches your customers into the Microsoft ecosystem. Before initiatives like WSL, github and their approach to open source it was either all Microsoft products, or no Microsoft products for a lot of businesses. (simplifying obviously, but you get the idea) And if you need 60% of your employees to be able to access and work with Linux tools every now and again you likely wouldn't get windows laptops, you would just get apple products.

It's about removing reasons to look outside of windows as your OS, they don't care if you work all day doing things in WSL if your still using windows.

I think the amount of GPU subscribers can be surprisingly high even without XCloud support, because it includes PC too.

Oh I agree!, what I meant was, since xcloud is bundled with game pass ultimate, they certainly expect some percentage of users to stream from xcloud. I was wondering how many server blades they anticipate needing for a number of people with access to xcloud. I admit this is sticking my thumb out the windows but I reckon they will have low single-digit millions of xcloud servers soon. maybe 1.5-2 million. It explains the leaks that we got that Microsoft was producing much more silicon than sony initially, from the moment that the silicon design is frozen for production the chips are losing in price to performance ratio, as better stuff comes out all the time. So I expect them to rollout xcloud to full deployment pretty quickly.

 

[ChuckeRearmed]

Oh, they certainly can put ps5 based server hardware out there. I meant that the number of people who play games varies wildly hour to hour, with peak times in the evening. If you cant use the PlayStation servers cant be used for azure functions more generally when there is less demand for game streaming its just wasted rack space. The only reason I think that xcloud makes sense to Microsoft is because they can use the xcloud blades for other revenue making purposes besides game streaming

Sony would have to rent the rack space at full whack, and wouldn't have the opportunity to use them for other things in a meaningful way.

What I meant by getting PlayStation games to run on xbox hardware I meant that the streaming versions of PlayStation games on PSNow might run on xcloud server blades, not retail releases.

PS keeps those servers without using them for computation and a lot of streaming services don't use them for anything else aside streaming. MS just wants to catch a two rabbits.

I think a lot of things like WSL are to reduce the cons list to windows, is how I would put it. If your a dev who uses Linux tools but likes office what do you do? without WSL being a thing you have to either dual boot or go full Linux then use something like OpenOffice. Its also part of their cloud push, a lot of azure customers use Linux in their servers, streamlining the dev experience on windows further entrenches your customers into the Microsoft ecosystem. Before initiatives like WSL, github and their approach to open source it was either all Microsoft products, or no Microsoft products for a lot of businesses. (simplifying obviously, but you get the idea) And if you need 60% of your employees to be able to access and work with Linux tools every now and again you likely wouldn't get windows laptops, you would just get apple products.

Hm, but Office 365 works for linux too no?

Oh I agree!, what I meant was, since xcloud is bundled with game pass ultimate, they certainly expect some percentage of users to stream from xcloud. I was wondering how many server blades they anticipate needing for a number of people with access to xcloud. I admit this is sticking my thumb out the windows but I reckon they will have low single-digit millions of xcloud servers soon. maybe 1.5-2 million. It explains the leaks that we got that Microsoft was producing much more silicon than sony initially, from the moment that the silicon design is frozen for production the chips are losing in price to performance ratio, as better stuff comes out all the time. So I expect them to rollout xcloud to full deployment pretty quickly.

Yet they produced less consoles that Sony. So they all went to cloud?

 

[liams]

PS keeps those servers without using them for computation and a lot of streaming services don't use them for anything else aside streaming. MS just wants to catch a two rabbits.

yes but using them for both is what makes it cost affective, rollout out tons of playstations that will only realistically be used for lets say 8 hours per day costs more per hour of streamed game content than Microsoft rolling out tons of xcloud blades, using them for only 8 hours per day of streaming, and then spending the next 16 doing other work. Just using those numbers it will be 3x more expensive for sony to stream content on a per hour basis than it would for microsoft.

Hm, but Office 365 works for linux too no?

Nope.
You can use the web version but its not fully featured, its basically a google sheets competitor

Yet they produced less consoles that Sony. So they all went to cloud?

For the initial push, I think so. With the server hardware, it doesn't matter if it's installed in the data centre tomorrow of two years from now, it will all pretty much have the same expiration date. So it makes sense to dedicate more silicon to producing servers at the start, to get the most use out of them in the data centre, even at the cost of some launch stock. Microsoft's launch lineup was always likely going to get beaten by sony, especially so once the pandemic hit, so they were likely thinking the following:
We don't have an amazing launch lineup, and our big hitters, like Halo and starfield maybe, other things like that, are next year. We could either, fully commit to making our launch allocations better, and dedicate all our silicon to producing xboxes, or we could focus on rolling out xcloud to some initial regions, like the US, South Korea, some other select markets, while still producing a decent number of consoles. That way when the big hitters do come, they can coincide it with the big xcloud push that they will inevitably do, without having to worry about running out of server capacity.
If someone wants an xbox right now, even with a less than compelling launch lineup but can't get one, they will still want one when the stock becomes more available. But if they start pushing xcloud and run into capacity issues that could forever associate the service with long wait times, frustrating issues etc, which is something they would be wanting to avoid.

 

[ChuckeRearmed]

yes but using them for both is what makes it cost affective, rollout out tons of playstations that will only realistically be used for lets say 8 hours per day costs more per hour of streamed game content than Microsoft rolling out tons of xcloud blades, using them for only 8 hours per day of streaming, and then spending the next 16 doing other work. Just using those numbers it will be 3x more expensive for sony to stream content on a per hour basis than it would for microsoft.

It also costs less for MS to stream from their own servers too. For Sony it might be more expensive but - just like with movie services - the profit might outweigh the costs. Of course cloud providers able to earn more from that. But still.