Platforms are an obstacle to customers, from the developer’s point of view. This has been obvious since the PS2-PS3 transition - and it’s why Sony is freaking out about PSN accounts. They don’t give a shit about your data. They desperately want to go back to when every game was made for one system and maybe got a conversion or two. The closest they can get is roping people into their ecosystem to justify the continued existence of their deliberately0incompatible AMD laptop opposite Microsoft’s deliberately-incompatible AMD laptop.
Same deal with Epic refusing to make Fortnite work on Steam Deck. It’s not a technical issue. They’re just having a slapfight with Valve. They want their store to stand up against (let’s face it) the de-facto monopoly source for major PC games, and the market says no.
Where this ends is the death of consoles.
There is no reason to release a game three or four separate times, with a private screening process for two or three of them, even if each release is goddamn near identical. All that’s really different is which middleman slices off an entire third of the publisher’s revenue. There are no technical reasons three of these platforms couldn’t just run the same executable with the same data. There’s differences - but not important differences. And even the ARM version could be served if games were published in .NET or SPIR-V or whatever. Slow startup time? Yeah, once, but games already take their sweet time installing. Even shaders need to compile and cache. That nonsense would be a lot more sensible if it let you buy whichever hardware was best from whoever the hell was selling it.
So really, where this ends is the death of platforms.
George, you don’t even own your movie anymore. The mouse bought it for four billion dollars.
Art belongs to its audience. Nobody has a right to censor it after-the-fact - least of all the artist. If you wanted it to be yours alone, you had the choice, and you instead decided to publish. Any control after that is a gift from us to you, and it’s a gift for the explicit purpose of getting us more art.
Oh right, this is .ml, where we’re playing make-believe that the lifetime figurehead who won an election against nobody is toootally a legitimate example of popular democracy. Because it would be impossible to criticize The West™ unless the immediate alternative was completely flawless.
Inventing a domestic video-game company obviously isn’t totalitarian, but it’s some Kim Jong Un shit. It’s an autocrat copying a theme park, with blackjack, and hookers. (Oh god. Tell me I’m not gonna see people pretend the Kims are anything but a hereditary monarchy.)
‘Just don’t buy it!’ I’m not, and yet: it keeps getting worse. It’s half the industry by revenue. And growing.
‘You just don’t like it!’ It monetizes human misery… inside entertainment. It makes gaming objectively worse.
‘Don’t legislate content!’ This is about the bus-i-ness mod-el. Sell whatever sex and violence you want. Just sell it.
‘There’s no exploitation here!’ Games make you value arbitrary worthless goals. That’s what makes them games.
One genius argued ‘other studios make several games over the decade these wallet-siphons have been dragged out, so they’d have to cost hundreds of dollars on release!’ Or. And this is just wild speculation about the cutting edge of computer science. Or they could make several games? Over time? And sell them for normal prices, less than a decade apart?
These people act like the just-sell-games model is unproven and hypothetical, in the same breath they insist it’s unaffected by this alternative of tricking people into tolerating endless fees. They’re not arguing. They’re just shuffling cards.
It started in “free” mobile trash and is now in $70 single-player games. This shit costs almost nothing to add. The backlash doesn’t outweigh the extra money squeezed out. This is the dominant strategy. It is half the industry’s revenue. What else needs to happen, to tell you everything else is in trouble?