You point the finger at retail and on some level it makes sense to want to funnel users towards your digital distribution platform to completely cut out the middle men and take the entire cut for yourself. So maybe it's a lot of this...

..but i'm looking at that 50% subscription increase as a sign of what they want. Rent forever, own nothing.

Hardware has costs and overhead associated. They need support people and to have depot services. The cost to sell a console today is getting to be on par with a gaming laptop or desktop (not high end, but something that can play games.) The margin after retailer share has to be lower than ever, and sales tax tariffs are coming hard and fast.

You can develop your games with studios all over the world though and sell them through your US publisher for no import sales tax... especially if it's on your subscription platform that is effectively impossible to tariff. They have the infrastructure readily available and totally paid for by business customers. Bandwidth costs next to nothing. Digital distribution has next to no overhead costs, unlike selling consumer hardware.

Ultimately Microsoft has a vested interest in Windows gaming, since it helps keep their market share and recurring subscription revenue. Few are linux gamers like I, and games are still being made that have 0 possibility of linux support, bf6 being the newest.

There's a momumental challenge of escaping the microsoft ecosystem, and they're pushing hard into the always online track everything you do on your computer and phone home to the mothership and sell your data to whoever is willing to buy it. Subscriptions will likely remove ads from future versions of windows.. and the holy grail of total control DRM is not far behind between forcing tpm/secureboot that ONLY works on windows 11.