Clear
i didn't want to respond to your last response because those goalposts were well and truly on the move so I thought I'd take it back to the original point.
Everything you said there can be flipped at Sony and also be true. I wasn't saying you were incorrect in accusing MS of those things just that Sony is just as bad. Both have done things to grow the industry and both have spent a lot of money to try and stifle the competition. Maybe you are just too invested to the point where you think that if someone says something negative about your favourite brand that it automatically means they are saying the opposite for the competing brand. Its OK to be critical of all these big companies.
Respectfully, I disagree on the basis of the perspective I outlined in post #475.
I feel like you're looking perhaps too narrowly, at a product level when I feel the crucial difference is overall commercial strategy. GamePass/Xcloud represents an attempt to establish a new commercial order for the industry, one in which MS cloud technology and storefronts are the nexus through which everything passes.
I don't fault MS for their ambition in the least, business is business. But my considered opinion is that it'll result in a far less appealing scene than we have today. I don't feel like the rise of streaming services has improved music, tv, or movies as artforms and I believe due to the economics it'll impact games far more than any of those other mediums.
My only real "problem" with Xbox is that I feel like they've underperformed on content generation since around the mid-point of the 360 era. Which is why I bring it up as a possible point of concern should they become market-leader.
And PSVR, yes I think that is one of the good things that Sony are doing to grow the industry. Its brought vr to console and lowered the barrier to entry. Getting this tech into the hands and onto the heads of people who otherwise wouldn't have the opportunity is great and Sony are investing and putting time into not only the hardware but the software too.
The value of PSVR2 is that it lends support and visibility to the overall VR-entertainment market. It should help VR grow as its existence encourages more developers to try their hand at an exciting and new technology.
Personally I see Gamepass and Xcloud like that too. It lowers the barrier of entry and allows people play a lot of games they possibly wouldn't otherwise have access to and even takes away the need completely for expensive specialised hardware. Surely even you can see that this is growing the industry when it's making gaming more accessible to a wider demographic than traditional console or PCs?
The problem with this argument is that its predicated on the idea that user-numbers are the thing that matters. When to me its all about the quality and variety of the content.
Look at the size of the mobile market and the insane amount of revenue it generates. In 2022 mobile is 51% of the total gaming market by revenue, but is that dominance reflected in the quality and variety of the product?
I really don't think it is.
My overriding concern is that the market and economic forces that shaped today's mobile scene will come to bear equally forcefully when the "traditional" gaming market becomes almost totally digitally distributed and operating via online storefronts.