At this point I have not seen any indication that Sony's success hurts Xbox. Microsoft has found a way to be successful that isn't tied purely to selling consoles.
Clearly they are doing something right because despite PlayStation fans laughing at MS for putting games on PC, Sony's now following suit. PlayStation fans said Game pass was terrible but it was far more successful than PS Now was. Sony also now likes elite controllers and achievements. It's good to see MS push Sony to provide better products to gamers.
Both companies are 'competing' but have different strategies and they can both be successful doing things their own way. Look at Nintendo to see how true that is.
Until there is an announcement that Xbox will be completely discontinued I'll continue to use their services and take advantage of the superior value. Forum console war stuff is pretty meaningless.
You are ignoring the nuance here.
- PlayStation fans say Gamepass is terrible because they think the day one business model for single-player games is flawed. Sony isn't doing that.
- The same goes for putting games on PC. Xbox has nullified the platform advantage they had by releasing their games on PC on day one. If Sony also does that, then that's stupid. It's fine and (likely) doesn't their platform advantage if those games are ported years after their PS release date and once the sales have dried up.
They are direct competitors because they make AAA games and have gaming ecosystems that target the same audience. They are fighting for the same market, but with different strategies.
Sony debuted in consoles, game subs and (multiplatform) cloud gaming before than MS. MS saw that success, tried to compete against it making their own versions of that but Sony always outperformed them. Sony focus there, particularly on their own console because selling games and services for it it's their main business. Game subs, cloud gaming, PC and mobile are only a secondary extra for Sony.
At some point MS thought that the console wars was lost so they started to slowly moving their game focus outide Xbox and went to chase the gaming money on all platfoms (they started with Minecraft) but specially on Window, where they started to release all their games day one. In fact they report their gaming numbers to their investors under "Other PC" stuff and their gaming division is no longer called Xbox division, it's MS Gaming instead.
The main MS business is Windows, subscription services and server based stuff so they are moving their AAA focus there, but also publishing on PS because the AAA money is in a big part there. Same goes with mobile, a big part of the gaming money is there so they are betting on mobile too. This doesn't mean they will release Halo on PS, at least not soon, but that they won't make exclusive the multiplatform IPs they bought because the main platform where these IPs make money is PS and to keep them exclusive wouldn't help them in the console wars, it only would make them earn less revenue so to hurt even more their profitability.
Nintendo and Sony consoles are very profitable business and makes sense for their platform owners to bet on exclusivity because thanks to their huge installbase it's worth for them. Xbox ecosystem is too small instead to justify the exclusivity of all this very expensive stuff, it makes more sense for them to keep it multiplatform to maximize their revenue and partly compensate a bit the profitability of putting all these AAA games day one on GP.
If it's a financial suicide for MS, it would be even more for Sony. Because their main business is not Windows, their main business is PlayStation. So to port a few old games to PC per year is ok for them, or to include old games on a game sub. But after these games already had their sales life cycle on PS, which is Sony's main business: having games being sold on their console.
To release all Sony games on PC, and even more if day one, would make pointless to buy a PS console, meaning it would kill Sony's gaming business: to sell games for their console. Same goes with including all their exclusives and other AAA games day one on their game sub: people would stop -or at least highly reduce- buying games for their console.
On top of that, Sony has a very profitable stategy with their game subs approach while the AAA games day one on a game sub isn't. MS still has to prove they can be profitable with this approach specially if not selling the games everywhere else.
