As they continue to spend billions buying publishers and developers to shore up their Game Pass offerings, expect prices to go up and the deals to get worse.
I agree with you about the brand loyalty. But the fact remains, they put out a console in 2020 that in some ways was actually weaker in power than the console they put out in 2017. Great for customers since it's so cheap, but not great for developers when other modern systems are so much more powerful. Larian can't even put out Baldur's Gate 3 on XSS because it can't handle split screen for that game, which means no XSX version either.
As for games... Everyone's different but as a big fan of the Xbox during the 360 era, the Xbox Series have no (exclusive) games that have appealed to me personally. And the ones that I am excited about (Fable, State of Decay 3, Everwild) have no release dates and are almost certainly years away.
"[Matt]has spent well in excess of £10,000 on player packs in the Fifa football game"
Holy shit. I spend a lot on video games, probably more than anyone should. But my biggest expenditures would be say a new system or peripheral. I can't even imagine spending that much, on one game, for no good reason.
If developers and publishers of these games werent complete pieces of shit, they would at least place a cap on how much one person could spend. But they won't.
The deal is for 10 years. That sounds like a lot but in reality that's just a bit longer than the average console generation. I would not be at all surprised if after the 10 years they make CoD completely Xbox exclusive.
I would argue that MS had every incentive to put Starfield out on PS5, but ultimately decided against it along with all new Zenimax games. They even estimated they would have sold 10 million copies on Playstation. I think that shows they are willing to forego money from some multiplatform games in the short term if they think they will make more money from Game Pass and Xbox hardware in the long run.
I'm a huge fan of Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden and Miasma Chronicles. They're both made by the same developer, The Bearded Ladies. Both feature excellent post apocalyptic stories and characters, as well as turn based combat with real time free roaming and exploration in between. Biggest difference is in MYZ you have a crew largely composed of anthropomorphic animals, who are hilarious. In MC, your main character (Elvis) and robot brother Diggs are trying to find your mom.
I would argue there's a huge difference between, say, one year of timed exclusivity for one game, versus buying an entire publisher and making every single one of their future games exclusive.
Yes it was... It was borderline unfair, haha.