I don’t think Nintendo ever tried to be a tech company. They have always been a game company first and foremost. If they were ever a kind of tech company, the closest analogy would be Apple, another company that focused on consumer electronics.
Nintendo collapsed its console and handheld product lines for the Switch. We’re also seeing large parts of the gaming industry adopt the Switch form factor for their products. I don’t think there is anything that Nintendo could innovate on that would sell.
But I point it out because a lot of these decisions to create freer platforms without advertising puts the cost of creation on the creator without a way for them to make money. People want their high quality content without paying for it.
The Nintendo 64 was really the last time Nintendo tried competing on hardware specs for the console market.
After that, you had a major electronics company subsidizing hardware to gain market share and a major software company subsidizing development and software graphics tools to be used also on their computer systems as the two different competitors.
Do they? I wouldn’t be surprised if AWS even charges Amazon.com full retail for hosting. The point is the company has a lot of different business units that report up to the CEO, and business units generally act like mini companies.
The accounting of charging full retail to other business units is a lot cleaner than giving preferred rates and making it harder to understand the finances of what is going on with the different business units.
A CEO may be willing to operate a business unit at a loss for strategic reasons, but they have to understand that said business unit is costing the company money.
From the point of view of AWS, they make money whether they host Twitch or some other streamer. If Twitch can’t make money paying retail hosting, the decision of what to do with it has to be made by people who control Twitch.
I disagree. I feel more like Steam has been focusing on being able to decouple from Windows. The hardware it has developed was paired with other initiatives to move beyond the Windows desktop. They are now at a point where they’ve basically created their own Switch that can run without Windows.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Steam finally makes consumer Linux on the desktop a thing.