So many franchises would die in the coming years if Xbox tried to rely on Xbox consoles alone .
Devs & publishers need the confidence that their hard work & money is not being wasted creating games or the game quality will get lower & lower so be thankful that Xbox games will have a backup plan.
But that's not the problem, that many franchises would die, of course they're doing the right move and of course games costs more and more and MS has been searching a way to make money without raising the prices of games (because gamers won't buy a 90$ game), costs of workers, raw material, manufacturing, transportation, electricity, everything rose +++, also the cost of making a AAA in 2002 isn't comparable to a AAA in 2024, we all know that.
Publishers try so many ways to make more money, DLCs (for the best and the worst), season pass, MS and Sony try sub services, but nothing seem to be enough to cover some dev costs. Sony can survive all these because they are leaders, by far, Nintendo too, but MS don't sell consoles, they have great consoles and had some nice exclusives, great other exclusives to come but nothing seem to sell Xbox consoles. Starfield had to be the game that unblocked all the situation for MS but it didn't, at all.
So they come to this extreme decision, that seem rough at first but that is indeed the only decision to make.
No no, the problem is not that, many of us here are hardcore gamers, in a sense that if we want Zelda we buy a Switch, if we want Horizon we buy a PS5 and if we want Halo we buy an Xbox.
But we must remember that most of the gaming market don't buy all consoles, 99,9% of gamers just get 1 console per gen, and if they want to go from PS to Xbox or Xbox to PS to they sell their console to buy the other.
And for many Xbox fans who decided to buy the Xbox, to chose this one and then decide to not get the PS5, they feel "betrayed", they chose the Xbox why ? For the exclusives to come, thinking "I want Starfield, HiFi Rush, Indy more than Spidey2, HFW, GT7" and now they figure out that if they bought the PS5 they'd have Starfield, HiFi Rush, Indy AND ALSO all the PS5 exclusives.
That obviously create quite the frustration. And good luck to MS to find the right words to explain this. Even if PS players need to way 1 or 2 years to get Indy or Starfield and more, they'll obviously rather wait than buying two 500$ consoles.