I thought this was an interesting read. Fahey points out some of the potential risks and rewards of Xbox’s current strategy of competition through acquisition. A small excerpt:

"The possible future that we originally saw for Xbox – the excitement about Microsoft’s renewed commitment to building up its studios to the point where it could be a genuine rival to Sony’s software slate – hangs in the balance. The alternative, in which almost a hundred billion dollars in total is spent to buy enough publishers to make Microsoft a major player, is probably the reality we’re getting.

“The extent to which that will hamper further development of Microsoft’s own game studios and first-party publishing remains to be seen, but it’s highly unlikely that the effect will be zero; no company, not even Microsoft, has unlimited bandwidth to keep every plate spinning all at once.”