Nilay Patel

It's worth noting that they ran into Apple's App Store rules.

Exactly.

And they were not able to do this in a way that actually worked.

I think you can blame Apple in a very significant way.

There's like pretty major antitrust ramifications of that, but Apple is still feeling it.

So it's really funny.

So when Phil Spencer was on the show in 2022, I asked him about this vision that the future of Xbox is Netflix.

Here's what he had to say.

Then there's the other part, which is,

man, it would be really cool if everyone just paid us $15 a month all the time.

And the games came out and everyone was just happy and that base of revenue was recurring and it was a little more stable than hits, than console generations.

Is that the move?

Because that seems like where you have been building for a long time, but it's harder to get there than maybe anyone anticipated.

To be fair, I heard that line at the beginning of the streaming transition in music very famously from Steve Jobs.

Actually, people like to own their music is a thing that he used to run around saying all the time.

Now, I feel like we're hearing it from the games industry.

Is that just the point on the curve that you're at?

Is some people are going to buy it and some people are going to stream and we're going to have one day five years and I wake up and it's all streaming and subscriptions or is it now?

Even as Phil was saying that to me, I was thinking, I don't believe you, but you've gone all in on all of these moves.

to get recurring revenue.