Xbox Business Update Podcast | Xbox Everywhere Direction Discussion

[Seanspeed]

If everything is an Xbox, nothing is an Xbox.

They're just turning into a 3rd party game publisher. They can make more hardware, but there's absolutely no reason people should buy it over something else. There's just almost no situation in which there wont be a clearly better alternative. They'll just sell ever worse than their current hardware. Eventually they'll realize there's no point in doing that anymore. Maybe they already know and just want to more 'smoothly' transition instead of doing a hard cut?

 

[fehu]

What bugs me is that if you have to sell hardware you have:
- huge R&D costs
- and then the actual production
- and software maintenance/upgrades etc
- and after selling, the eventual warranty (but just for 1 or 2 years)

If you go cloud you have:
- huge R&D costs
- and then the actual production
- and software maintenance/upgrades etc
- to have a server close to the users, or ditch completely some countries
- plus you must pay for energy/cooling/network bills and all the infrastructure and worldwide personnel to connect and maintain all these racks
- does something break after a standard warranty expires? still on your wallet to replace it
- with any sales figure cut by 30% to sell on other platforms

If you just make software, you have fixed costs, but on the cloud model, the more you sell, the higher the costs.
They have a wider view of hard numbers, but still, the math looks like it doesn't maths.