MS has talked about their goal that all Xbox One and Future games be available on xCloud. I absolutely expect that if you own a game digitally, that you'll have access to that game on xCloud. The
MS Blogpost about xCloud even features a video casually mentioning RDR2. I think an advantage of xCloud is that it will likely have pay to play (standard digital game purchase) and subscribe to play (Gamepass) options - allowing devs and gamers to best choose what works for them.
Buying a game for $60, then having access to it on my Xbox Scarlett at home, then in the car on my phone through xCloud - sounds amazing.
I suggest you take a look at what nvidia is doing with Geforce Now, and the
list of games playable on that service and how it works. Games from the supported list that you own on Steam are playable in the cloud via Geforce Now.
As a developer/publisher, why wouldn't you want your games more accessible? Allowing your game playable in more scenarios is a win. EA has talked publicly about building their own cloud platform, and I can see a scenario where they'd find it to be a conflict for their games also on xCloud. But for example Ubisoft has already partnered with Google on the Project Stream Beta and has lots of games on Geforce Now, why wouldn't they also partner with Xbox?
Content is king, and the more gamers playing your content, the more profitable you're likely to be.
I agree there's potential for compromises, but also for advantages as well. Most of the posts regarding this discussion viewed having a chip do double duty (server and xbox) as negative - replacing a component for gaming with a component for server usage. I think it's just as likely an "and" situation as it is an "or" situation. As I mentioned in my post, there's potential offsetting the cost of the hardware due to it's wider use case - this could allow for lower cost hardware or more power (expensive) hardware for the same price.
