this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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If you felt like you had to buy both consoles, that means the market got more competitive.
Competition means there's choice. Segregating titles that were once across multiple platforms (choice) into individual platforms (no choice) is anti-competitive.
I can't really break it down more than that and I thought this was obvious...
You do have choice. You have choice between group of exclusives A and group of exclusives B. It's better for competition but worse for the consumer. In order for it to be better for the consumer and competition, you'd need to eliminate the concept of exclusives entirely. And I'm all for that, but I don't know how to make that happen.
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Well since exclusives will continue to exist, imagine if, hear me out here, third party titles remained cross platform and group B developed their own set of games at worst through infant studio acquisitions instead of, idk, acquiring the second largest third party publisher in the world (and thus all their studios).
Then that would be decidedly less competitive between the two consoles.
Yeah the poor trillion dollar company couldn't possibly compete with the billion dollar company by organically building an attractive portfolio. It's not like they did it before and only lost their position due to their own mishandling of studios and misunderstanding of the market.
They seemingly can't compete, so this is how they're making up for the ground that they lost, because right now the console market is not particularly competitive.
Not when there was a whole ecosystem of platform neutral third-party publishers and additional exclusives are taken out of that. You are not getting more and new games, you are just being required to buy an additional device for the same games. How could it be more competitive if the market is consolidated into less companies?
Because a third party publisher is a supplemental actor to a console market when they make games for both platforms. If the one getting its ass kicked makes those games more scarce on its competitor's console, it becomes more difficult for you, the consumer, to choose one, which means the market got more competitive. Or you buy both, which means both competitors (Nintendo doesn't really count here) are healthy for each getting your sale. If your default answer was to buy a PlayStation and to hell with Xbox, that's less competitive.
The third party video game market is in no danger of monopolizing, on the other hand. Ubisoft/EA/ActiBlizz/Take Two all put their eggs in fewer and fewer baskets, and now the Devolver Digitals, Anna Purnas, TinyBuilds, Focus Homes, Paradoxes, and Embracers of the world are growing to fill the market voids those big publishers left by putting out fewer games.
Microsoft creates demand for their system largely by buying up publishers and turning all their future games exclusive, that would otherwise have been multiplatform.
Sony and Nintendo create demand for their system largely by making great games in house, that otherwise never would have existed.
So yes you're right but one is much shittier than the other.
The games made in house are functionally identical to buying a studio that already existed. It's a game that can't be played anywhere else for arbitrary business reasons. I'd consider Sony's shittier, because I have to wait two years for a PC port, and Nintendo's shittier still because those games will never legally leave their platform.