They’re destroying consoles, as a concept. The Xbox has arguably been about that from the get-go. It was a stripped-down gaming PC aimed at crossover between PC and console games. Microsoft encouraged multiplatform development by selling a glorified compiler target. The 360’s hardware was bizarre, for that goal, but you may remember it had excellent ports when the PS3 was struggling.

By the PS4 / Xbone generation it was over. Both machines are nearly-identical AMD laptops. Both machines got mid-generation “pro” upgrades. Every hardware launch is in lockstep, so there’s no point getting in early or waiting for more power. It’s just - do you want the blue one, or the green one?

Making developers publish separate blue and green versions is a situation they hate. They want to sell games to players. Players want to buy those games. At this point, the branded console market is a rent-seeking middleman layer for mildly-obfuscated midrange PCs. There’s one or two neat tricks that consoles have enabled and Windows doesn’t… for some reason… but the bigger obstacle to smooth PC performance has been broken-by-design DRM like Denuvo.

The point of the Xbox will become the same point as a Steam Deck.: a reasonably-priced game-centric alternative to managing a desktop or laptop. Yeah, a PS6 will play most of your Xbox Whatever games, if you buy the versions that only work on PS6. But the Xbox Whatever should play absolutely goddamn anything, except the three games a year that Sony hordes.

Microsoft doesn’t want to win the console war. Microsoft wants to win at computing.