I don't know if they do.
I do know that if they do, they explicitly had contracts in the past, when the games were published structured in a way that gives them permission to do so now. There is no way for Nintendo to do the same. They would have to negotiate new deals and it's not actually possible to do so for more than a small handful of third party games at absolute best.
Also, Microsoft is a far bigger company than Nintendo.
Privacy.
Both of a microphone and a phone app are serious privacy concerns.
If I can import images straight to my phone on the spot/while I'm driving home that would make me a lot more likely to upgrade. I don't "need" it, but I don't bring my laptop everywhere and sometimes I can't be bothered to get it out to move photos around.
So their stuff there's no excuse.
Third party stuff they can't do without contracts.
I might if I didn't just get BG3. I'll still get it pretty close to launch barring serious issues, though. Everything I've seen about the scale and what the game is is what I've been waiting for for a while.
I know Bethesda isn't perfect and I didn't love FO4, but it's in large part because of the reliance on VATS for combat instead of making guns feel OK. Gunplay looks a lot better and more dynamic and just that combined with Bethesda's world building/sense of exploration (which exists in Fallout, too; it's just overshadowed to me by the mechanics) are super promising. There are always bugs with anything as ambitious as Bethesda makes, because it takes dozens of hours of testing per 10 minute encounter to comprehensively test one, and you can't exactly unit test video games (though we might not be super far off from training AI to supplement human testing), but I rarely experience anything near as annoying as the vitriol implies and I just don't care.
I get the don't preorder principle, but it's on steam. I get to have it downloaded ahead of time and ready for launch, and if there actually are issues it's extremely simple to get my cash back. Refunds make as much (or more) impact as waiting to buy it, so if a game is actually broken my voice is theoretically louder anyways.
It's the core because they spend a sizable portion of their resources on making it that way. Every line of code that doesn't explicitly keep interoperability in mind is a line of code with the potential to catastrophically break it.
It's not something you can do, then you have it. It's like exercise. The day you stop it starts to fall away.
They are reworking their tooling and engine constantly.
If they weren't making a deliberate point of making extensibility a priority, it would disappear on its own as development that didn't make it a focus left it behind. It doesn't just magically happen. It's because of good process.
It absolutely is.
If you don't make extensibility a core philosophy every step of the way, it disappears very quickly.
It's a Q&A. People asked about shit they know about from other games.
Everyone uses the same engine over and over. Starting from scratch instead of iterating on your previous engine is the exception, not the norm.
I've had a couple times I thought about it when I was genuinely annoyed at whatever behavior, and a couple times I thought about doing the opposite and going through whatever the process is to say "this lawsuit is horseshit".
Ultimately I haven't done either though.
I want Valve to encourage developers to use their branch tool like Witcher 3 did with the next gen upgrade to make high resolution assets optional.
There's no reason to have 100-something GB of assets on an 800p device. Same with languages. Support is awesome. Disrespecting my storage to pack them all without any way to cut out the waste isn't.
That's before the heavy duplication of assets for sequential HDD loads that I'm guessing hasn't disappeared yet.