Who's hoping? What they should do and what they will do are two very, very different things.
Exactly.
Nobody is "hoping" they leave the hardware business.
The market reality is that we are seeing it play out in front of our very eyes.
- 67% of Microsoft's software revenue comes from Playstation platforms and it is growing.
- Playstation 5 sold 9.5 Million Units last Quarter, which is 33% of the ENTIRE LIFETIME SALES of Xbox Series S / X in just 3 months
- Microsoft is already clearly messaging that ALL of their games will be coming to Playstation in the future, and the trend is Day and Date
Look at the facts. What Microsoft is doing is planning a "Slow-Sega". The Xbox Series consoles are a failure commercially, with rapidly worsening sales in every single market. Double digit decreases in sales for multiple years. They have capitulated their stance on exclusives AND MUST release on Playstation to survive. The actual audience for an Xbox device going into the future is practically ZERO for a new consumer, and the only utility an Xbox will have is to simply carry over existing game purchases onto relevant hardware going forward. It's an olive branch to not abandon their users, which are now flocking to both PS5 and PC in record numbers.
How this starts is Microsoft still releases Xbox hardware in the form of multiple devices, but they do not subsidize these consoles/handhelds, and they ALSO add in side-loading of PC applications to bridge the gap of PC/Xbox ecosystems. These consoles will NOT be cost competitive with PS6, but may offer some differentiation in terms of power and where the console may cost what you would expect from a gaming PC. So what Microsoft is doing is comepting with a potential Steam Box and Steam OS to bridge the PC/Console gap going forward, but they are not competing with Sony on affordable, mainstream consoles. You should expect this approach will be extremely niche, essentially < 20 Million units sold over an entire generation. Eventually, Microsoft creates an emulation for their Xbox Store and Platform onto a PC, and there's virtually no difference between the two platforms.
Maybe they continue making hardware and are fine with only selling 10-20 million units, tops, but they are effectively abandoning the race for mainstream console sales. Eventually it may not be worth it at all and just completely abandon the hardware market because there's no value they can add to it.