These rollouts make little sense. Perhaps the company is still trying to straddle the line between reaching as many players as possible and burning fans who bought Xbox hardware under the belief that they would not be able to get those games elsewhere.

I think that's exactly it.

In 2017, I wrote on Twitter that Xbox had clearly lost the hardware war to PlayStation and should consider transforming its consoles into living room PCs with open operating systems that could run any computer game. As the company behind the Windows operating system, Microsoft is in a unique position to sell machines that combine the convenience and affordability of consoles with the flexibility of PCs.

I think that's exactly what they're going to do in the next 2-4 years. It's just about the only way to satisfy all of the things that they're promising or hinting at in public statements, especially coupled with what they've been saying about handhelds in a world where the Steam Deck exists.

I too thought that when they spent $70B on Activision that they'd be using that to bolster their roster of exclusives, but perhaps the economic reality of AAA game development has just finally hit that tipping point where exclusives don't make sense anymore. Sony sure seems to think so. They've got the runaway dominating high end console; they still feel the need to put out games on PC, and despite their best efforts, they can't yet get people to move on from PS4.