So I ended up watching this last night and didn't get time to post my thoughts
Overall, it's hard to take much from the conference when it comes to games. I don't really get hyped off of trailers for new IPs (because I don't really know what to expect) and there wasn't too much gameplay shown. Overall it was an average showing. The problem is, MS can't really be afforded the benefit of the doubt when it comes to "waiting" for games because they haven't shown a history of putting out great titles consistently. I think you'd be doing yourself a disservice by owning only an Xbox next gen, unless you just completely don't care for Sony games. Which at the end of the day, if most of your gaming consist of third party titles, then you'll be fine as usual.
My biggest question mark when it comes to MS isn't even about the games, surprisingly. It's the direction they're taking. I love what GamePass provides, even if the options aren't as great on the PC. And Sony needs to really do an overhaul of Playstation Now to compete with it. But even with all the good they're doing when it comes to messaging, MS approach to this gen, for the lack of better word, seems boring?
PS5 design, for better or worse, got people talking. It garnered millions of YouTube views. The conference got a lot of people excited even if they didn't show anything. The Epic Games demo got people talking about TFLOPS and SSD's transfer speeds in ways I didn't know were possible
I feel like Microsoft is struggling to get people to care about the hardware/brand right now. And as consumer friendly the idea is of allowing the Xbox One X to play newer titles for a couple of years is, I think a lot of newer titles actually benefit from being on exclusively new hardware. The idea of a making the "Xbox" a service is great. But it also seems like they put a lot of effort into making the new box a powerful one and it feels like an afterthought at the moment. I just don't think pushing the service needs to come at the expense of the hardware.