Did it really... go wrong?
Sure, if we look at console sales Xbox isn't really in the best position, but if we take a look at the whole picture, they have been, little by little, getting exactly what they wanted:
- Normalized microtransactions in first party games
- Always online DRM slowly becoming the norm
- Consoles as multimedia machines
- Digital future slowly becoming a reality
- DirectX, while still competing with OpenGL and now Vulkan, is the de facto standard API on PC
- Xinput is THE standard input API not only on PC, but basically everywhere (even on iOS?)
- They have acquired two of the top third party players, effectively gaining the ability to exert pressure on their direct competitors, and a chokehold on certain key franchises like Minecraft and Call of Duty
- Cloud gaming and subscription services are slowly becoming normalised. They even used Gamepass as a trojan horse to ease the PC crowd into it
- And with Cloud gaming, they're making themselves a place inside mobile and Android (meaning, not only android phones), where they failed miserably before.
As much as i don't like Microsoft's approach to gaming (the have fucked up gaming more than Sony did, imo), their strategy is
genius, regardless of if they're doing it on purpose or not. They're playing the long game, and they're winning, forcing their adversaries to react instead of coming up with their own solutions.