alt Hacker News> Is there a danger of doing to games what Spotify has done to music?
I think such business model ultimately doesn't scale well for games (several million-dollars production budgets sharing minuscule pieces of a ~$20 all-you-can-eat subscription pie).
Microsoft always knew this, they didn't try to win the market, they tried to subvert the business model, probably expecting the industry as a whole moving towards it -- which didn't happen at all, at least not yet.
Simple math would prove this. There's no way acquiring half the good studios in the world and make them release flop after flop was a break-even operation. It's several orders of magnitude behind.
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Most of the market talks Nintendo, Sony, XBox, Apple Arcade, Android.
Exactly because they aquired half the good studios, they happen to be one of the biggest publishers, people forget some of those studios keep using their own branding instead of anything Microsoft, and it would hurt Steam if Microsoft decides all those studios would pull out of it.
Microsoft moved to a subscription service because they botched the launch of the Xbox One, with users accumulating digital libraries on the PlayStation, and that failure is something that has continued to drag them further and further down.