Agreed, when a player far richer starts using outside funds from other near monopoly markets to starve the competition out of games buying large publishers would be a good time to take a gander. It could help if that same company had already been found guilty of abusing their monopoly in both the US and EU and is quite well know for abusing their control of industries too.
The reasons where their own, it was not Sony unfairly squeezing them out, this is revisionist history.
Again revisionist history and a bit hilarious too if you think about it as MS, especially compared for their size, was the one not growing their internal stable of studios and relying on timed and full exclusives a lot, locking competitors from their network (see reasons why FFXI never allowed cross platform gameplay and FFXIV never even arrived there… before they were Falling behind and suddenly cross platform gameplay became important).
MS itself was thinking if they wanted to bother or not with making plastic boxes until they made a plan to use their wealth to move the battle to content streaming/subscriptions and had regulators finally off their backs after years of very close oversight… what did they do after? Took their Azure/Windows/Office money and started pouring almost $100 Billion to buy permanent exclusives while singing the praises of bringing games to more people
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How many were those developed by their own studios they grew over time (sure compare ND now to the huge kennel it was in the post Crash Bandicoot days lol). Same thing with Insomniac which they have been growing a lot by hiring (both companies had aligned themselves to Sony from the start too).
Yes and the size and IP controlled by said studios matters too. “Next question: is hiring 50,000 people that different from buying publishers with 50,000 people working for them in one big purchase and making that publisher’s games exclusive?”…
If you are a $3 Trillion dollar company with huge margins and raise prices, cough… Apple cough…, is one thing but sure let’s compare the PS5 price increase and put it in the mix… sorry, but still feels like throwing things at the wall and false equivalences.