How the hell would the math on a cloud only tier work? People not buying the hardware lowers their earnings, and every hour someone plays on cloud instead of their own hardware increases their costs. Cloud users are a way worse value proposition than console users before you discount the price.

Microsoft hasn’t exactly given us a blow-by-blow breakdown of how much Xbox Cloud Gaming costs to run, but you need only look at other cloud services like Netflix and Spotify to get an idea

This is laughable. Almost all of the scaling those services have managed is because of massive caching to lower the distance data has to travel, with some bonus “high computation for hyper-efficient encoding” scaling. Every user of cloud gaming has to have all the game activity personally calculated and every frame rendered and encoded individually for just them. There’s no comparison to video.