Comment Re:Loss leader? (Score 1) 55
Considering how easy it is to port or support a game on Linux or Mac these days with WINE (with vibe coding), even Windows support seems a diminished quality for gaming.
I've personally taken 2 old games and made them playable on MacOS just vibing them. One was Homeworld, and the other was an indie game (the name of which I can't remember, but it was in the theme of Thief).
There was a time not that distant from now when Microsoft was getting a significant percentage of their revenue from gaming. This seems like they're slaughtering their sacred cow.
I can't see much upside for Microsoft in the future. They're basically moving cloud-only for most products, except for Windows itself. I understand how that works on the books, but I don't see how well that works for their customers. They're shrinking their market substantially to cater to larger and larger enterprises.
(THeir GPU investments have largely been a loss leader for their other cloud services... "data has inertia" or however that saying goes: storage, compute, and network activity on their cloud which wouldn't have gotten used if not for people moving data to the cloud to process it, subsidizes the discounted GPUs. All the cloud providers are doing this.)