On Sunday Xbox held their E3 games showcase and after the event they released an announcement on the Xbox Wire blog stating that they will be bringing next-generation games to the Xbox One family of consoles later this year using Xbox Cloud Gaming in a small and easy to miss sentence that can be seen in full below.

For the millions of people who play on Xbox One consoles today, we are looking forward to sharing more about how we will bring many of these next-gen games, such as Microsoft Flight Simulator, to your console through Xbox Cloud Gaming, just like we do with mobile devices, tablets, and browsers.

This is a first in the industry as far as I’m aware and shows that Microsoft is more concerned with the sales of software and services rather than the sales of hardware. This makes sense because consoles are generally sold at a loss so for Microsoft to make up this cost they need to sell software and services as well such as Xbox Game Pass and the 30% cut they currently take on Xbox store purchases.

This does not mean that Microsoft is going to stop selling consoles. It just means that services have become much more important

This is good for both users and Microsoft because it gives more people a reason to keep using their old consoles and it also allows Microsoft to earn more money from as many people as possible and let people on their older consoles play the latest games. They also announced that all of their server blades will be upgraded to Xbox Series X hardware soon.