While Microsoft is the most successful of the big three in terms of overall finances, the problem with them is their inability to believe in their own products if they don't yield those immediate results. Kinect was not something they seriously supported. It failed. They made HD-DVD an add on. It failed. Honestly, it often feels fatalistic, and I suspect they would not have bothered with creating the Xbox 360 had the original Xbox not outsold GameCube, a product from the industry's longest surviving platform holder. In that case, they were eager to kill the original Xbox—a little too eager in my opinion, which brought us the Red Ring of Death. Genuinely, VR was the next logical evolution of Kinect. I don't doubt that would be in the cards.

That said, I fully expect Microsoft to support VR by partnering with an existing manufacturer in the future. Why? Because they want to people to invest in their infrastructure without committing to creating a product themselves: xCloud is definitively Microsoft's way to enter the handheld market without having to invest in developing hardware. They will likely extend this to VR. I expect them to make some original content in VR that is also available on Game Pass for PC users.

Didn't they axe Kinect before they decided to say they were going to have VR on their system to try and take attention away from Sony? Nothing was preventing them from partnering with Occulus from what I can tell. That was an active decision on their part to just abandon the idea. Had nothing to do with Kinect, just lack of interest on their part outside the ability to market a USP for their struggling system which they decided to not do anything with....not unlike the Kinect itself.

I am not sure that would've made sense as I think VR is still in its infancy from an adoption point-of-view. But nonetheless, I think that they should support VR and have it as part of XB as it give gamers more choice.

Personally, I would not buy it, but there are many that probably would. LOL. My Oculus Rift is collecting dust, and I have therefore avoided PSVR on my PS4 Pro. - There are some fundamentals on VR that keep me away from it now and going forward.

Still a very niche device imo. Microsoft plays too safe and methodically. I doubt they haven't considered any of this going forward.

Yeah. Don't bite off more than you can chew

This is true, Whats the point of VR if you cant make great regular games.

With XBox, they were stuck. There's no way they could have squeezed enough juice from Xbox Ones to power VR, and didn't have the foresight Sony did with planning it all out before the PS4 even launched. When X1X came out, I'm sure they realized the install base wouldn't be big enough to make VR worth the investment. The master stroke from Sony was to get VR working for base PS4 models which dramatically increased their potential install base. When you take the limited power those PS4s had into account, that's no small miracle...

As usual they’re( Microsoft) waiting for everyone to do the cleaning of the forest and build their house then claim they did all the work after putting the fence door

They're trying to be the go to api to use with vr, but it's not really going that way for them. While each headset has it's own api, the companies are still collaborating on tech, while MS is trying more to say that these companies should use their tech, which is pretty far behind in functionality.

At this point, MS would have to have something pretty substantial to offer to bring out their own headset. They dragged their feet, and like so many other things, they'll likely try to claw their way into the market later when its successful.

Their best bet if they want to offer it to their customers is to just partner with another vr maker

When it came to xbox, they just wanted to try and take some hype away from sony. So much of the talk prelaunch of psvr was that ms oculus partnership would yield better results.

Sony spent 10 years developing psvr. MS thought they could just slap a xbox logo on another companies set and call it a day.

Yeah. Not the best dev by a long shot, but I've heard Bulletstorm improved a lot after the initial launch and all the complaints.