They made a pretty big promise in Alyx, which he acknowledged in the documentary. It's also been about 5 years since Alyx was announced and released around the Game Awards, so given that promise that they made 5 years ago, maybe this year is the year.
I've only got a few. Several of them don't really track hours, but I know I've put over 1000 into them. Games like Super Smash Bros. (Melee, Brawl, and 4) and Rock Band 2.
Other than those, the only one I've measurably put 1000 hours into is Skullgirls, but Guilty Gear Strive will likely get there in a few years. Skullgirls is a game with so much depth that I can't imagine ever getting bored of it. If anything, I'd just lose motivation because I can't see the path to improving, but I'll definitely never see every permutation of strategies you can employ by combining characters together. Guilty Gear Strive has so many creative ways to use its expanded Roman Cancel system that any Evo highlight reel is full of creative ways out of situations that you've never seen before.
You can pay for online multiplayer and not have an offline option on consoles. There's no reason to believe that paying for it would make more games playable offline.
You don't remember pre-Steam then, because it was already headed down this path. Piracy and used copies have been the boogieman for a long time, and doing anything they can to prevent both was always the natural destination of the industry, unless more people start shopping on GOG.
At this point, I'm aching desperately for that linear shooter. They have other strengths. Halo Infinite offered a ton more freedom than the old games, but it was worse off for it.
The project came before a publisher owned them.
They've publicly mentioned that they're building a "preservation team", and the thing that makes that make sense to me is forward compatibility for Xbox executables on Windows somehow.
I'd very much prefer to not even have them take up shelf space, but it's the only way that exists to actually own a copy of a movie or TV show. I have ripped a number of them, but if someone made the GOG for movies, I'd move all of my purchases over there.
I'd be happy with DRM-free video purchases, but they don't exist like they do for video games, and even video games aren't available DRM-free across the board.
I don't think I ever pitched a subscription as being better than ownership, just that your joke is divorced from the reality of the situation and the way Microsoft has operated for over a decade, and that's why the joke didn't land. Microsoft won't get a stranglehold on the market, despite their best efforts.
What do you think consoles are? They are just a pc with proprietary software and hardware.
You are missing the distinction by several miles. A short list includes the lack of cert, the availability of competitors on the same platform, and backward compatibility whether they like it or not. If the value proposition is as poor as you expect it to be, then the launch of a portable Xbox will hardly be noticed next to the Steam Deck, but the more likely scenario is that it's basically a Steam Deck that plays nicer with Game Pass and anti cheat technologies because it's actually Windows under the hood. You've demonstrated a large lack of understanding about what's changed between 6th gen consoles and today, but the short explanation is that I don't see a reason to expect Microsoft to charge you for Halo again on this new platform, because it would be marketing suicide among plenty of other reasons.
There seem to be a lot of people here who haven't gotten the memo that future Xboxes are likely to just be disguised Windows PCs, because they're mostly interested in Game Pass and know they can't compete otherwise. On an open platform, they couldn't stop you from continuing to play your old games. They really don't care about you re-purchasing their old games because they want you to rent a library. That's why your joke was bad.
My hope is that consumers have lost confidence in games that they know have no value if they don't attract a massive audience. We used to get games like StarCraft and Halo that had single player, cooperative, and competitive modes. We used to be able to host our own servers. Without those things, the value proposition drops precipitously if it isn't a massive hit. I hope that's the reason it flopped.