XBox can be viable for Microsoft to work on in third place in a way that it wouldn't be viable for Sony and Nintendo.

Nintendo as a company is designed to put consoles and games in peoples' hands only. Nintendo as a company folds without the ability to do that.

Sony successfully used two generations of its console to dominate a larger strategic market for Sony, video playback. However, now that everything is streaming, that kind of puts Sony gaming division in the same place as Nintendo, its value is only to shareholders is only in putting consoles and games into peoples' hands.

Microsoft, in contrast, has always used the XBox as a way to extend PC gaming to a new market and continues to do so. Microsoft can tolerate being in "a distant third" because development costs are far lower making something XBox compatible usually means it will make porting to the PC easier.

Microsoft wants to focus solely on XBox sales, as it is kind of dumping into the console market based on its PC gaming monopoly.