I see a lot of people here who are very happy that the Xbox is more than in a bad place right now. They want it to crash an burn. I have all the current consoles, but even if I only had the Ps5, that wouldn't be a good thing if Sony suddenly had no more competition (Nintendo is not their direct competition).
Ok let's look at what could happen if Xbox would exit the gaming market:
- Budgets for the games would be smaller. 200 million for God of War? What for? Half that or less would be enough.
- Sony just bought a lot of new studios, none of that would have happened. In fact, they would very likely downsize significantly.
- The game quality would probably suffer as well.
- Game prices could rise even further.
- Playstation VR would probably not happen either.
- Without competition, the Ps Plus costs would probably rise as well.
There would probably be more things happening that I'm not thinking about right now. Competition is good without it there will be no progress.
All of this is BS because MS is barely relevant in the gaming market as it is (other than to discussion about failed publisher acquisition attempts) and none of that has happened.
Historically, Sony led the market when MS wasn't even in it and none of these fear-mongering issues were present.
In fact, back before MS entered console gaming, the market was in an arguably much stronger healthier position (with games focused on art and gameplay and not graphics---which necessitate ever-ballooning game budgets) and we certainly got WAAAAAY more creative games out of the Japanese gaming industry; since home console gaming was more popular in Japan.
MS very much led an industry-wide shift to western-centered, western-focused development, which turned off Japanese console gamers and resulted in a complete shift in the Japanese gaming market to mobile platforms, leading to a loss of home console development focus for Japanese devs and publishers.
If you don't like Eastern-developed games, you probably won't care. But I love Japanese games and I believe they're absolutely essential for a gaming platform if it's going to appeal to me as a gamer.