Original report comes from the paywalled The Information, that they tried to sell to private equity for $100B-$150B, but that it was short lived and fell through. This backs what a lot of us have been thinking based on the moves Sharma has been making, that they track with a sell-off of the Xbox brand.
The idea of Xbox being sold or spun off has been around at least since Satya took over. He’s very business focused. I’m guessing “play” isn’t a big part of his life.
I’m sure behind the scenes Phil convinced Satya that he could make Xbox a viable business on par with Windows, and was given a deadline to make it happen. He was partially successful but never got it to the line item necessary, partly because Windows kept growing too, and faster. And, unfortunately for Phil, Xbox Series failed to sell. I’m guessing there won’t be another console generation.
Satya sees it as a failed experiment, I’d bet, and now it’s time to get it properly wrapped up and shoveled off. I think it’s too big to just shutter it, but it will be hard to find a buyer too.
Xbox was only created to help vendor lock-in for Windows.
The X in Xbox was DirectX, the goal was to get developers off of OpenGL.
With the rise of Vulkan, and DX12 being extremely similar, there’s little reason for Xbox to exist from Microsoft’s perspective
Not to mention proton and dx2vk handle playing directx games on Linux more reliably than most linux native games (at least in my experience… If a game doesn’t work, odds are it’s using the steam linux runtime and switching to proton gets it to work).