As they continue to spend billions buying publishers and developers to shore up their Game Pass offerings, expect prices to go up and the deals to get worse.
I agree with you about the brand loyalty. But the fact remains, they put out a console in 2020 that in some ways was actually weaker in power than the console they put out in 2017. Great for customers since it’s so cheap, but not great for developers when other modern systems are so much more powerful. Larian can’t even put out Baldur’s Gate 3 on XSS because it can’t handle split screen for that game, which means no XSX version either.
As for games… Everyone’s different but as a big fan of the Xbox during the 360 era, the Xbox Series have no (exclusive) games that have appealed to me personally. And the ones that I am excited about (Fable, State of Decay 3, Everwild) have no release dates and are almost certainly years away.
The deal is for 10 years. That sounds like a lot but in reality that’s just a bit longer than the average console generation. I would not be at all surprised if after the 10 years they make CoD completely Xbox exclusive.