Actually, Valve owns that space. They have 132 million active monthly users. For comparison, Xbox has 120 million. Seems like only a minor lead until you look at the revenue: Steam (Valve) brings in ~$8 billion in revenue whereas Xbox brings in ~$4 billion.
Microsoft's operating overhead with Xbox is also vastly greater than Steam. Supposedly they make ~$28 every time they sell an Xbox One. That's based on just the manufacturing/parts cost of the hardware and doesn't include the costs associated with developing the hardware itself where they don't just take off-the-shelf chips and throw in an existing OS (like the Steam Deck) but instead custom-engineer a processor/architecture and make their own custom operating system.
If anybody wanted to take a dominant place in the industry they’d buy Valve but Valve is not for sale. For instance, if Gamestop has bought Valve at the top they’d have an answer to the problem of digital downloads eliminating both the buy and sell sides at Gamestop.
what I was trying to say is that microsoft owns the developer space, Valve has been a tough contender but also, microsoft has never gone straight against valve probably because the business wigs consider videogames less important than microsoft's other businesses.
so I should have said that while Valve may own the marketplace (the "app store") microsoft still owns what it takes to make a game in the first place. which is why facebook doesn't really stand a chance against MS. this also explainss how it came to pass that nobody cared about zuckerberg's metaverse... the metaverse didn't get access to the really cool graphic engines
Developer space? Isn’t that like Unity, Unreal, everybody except Microsoft?
I think the whole point of XBOX, GAME PASS and all that is to convince people who don’t play games (stock market analysts) that Microsoft is relevant. It’s vice signalling.
Microsoft's operating overhead with Xbox is also vastly greater than Steam. Supposedly they make ~$28 every time they sell an Xbox One. That's based on just the manufacturing/parts cost of the hardware and doesn't include the costs associated with developing the hardware itself where they don't just take off-the-shelf chips and throw in an existing OS (like the Steam Deck) but instead custom-engineer a processor/architecture and make their own custom operating system.