The problem is if Sony has a monopoly on the premium console market
“premium console” is such a weird qualifier to get around the fact that Nintendo Switch is the best selling console and Sony has no monopoly anywhere. Microsoft is the company that bought Activision-Blizzard, Bethesda, Minecraft, and more. They are the one with anti-consumer practices, scooping up everything with their money from their Windows and Office monopolies. You’re just bitter because you sank a lot of money into a bad system nobody likes. It really is not Sony’s fault that everybody wants God of War, Spider-Man, etc. and nobody wants mediocre games like Starfield, Redfall, Halo, etc.
Blame Microsoft for promoting the Series S to customers as being identical to Series X, other than games are just lower resolution and lacking a disk drive. It is Microsoft’s fault that the performance profiles of their two distinct consoles is that the Series S cannot play Baldur’s Gate multiplayer and that the policies prevented Larian to port their game to Xbox until they got a special exemption for feature disparity. It is Microsoft’s fault that the proclaimed 1440p system (Series S) needs further resolution, graphics quality, and framerate downgrades compared to Series X. It’s Microsoft who don’t even care that much about Xbox because all their games are better of Microsoft’s other platform (Windows) anyway.
Sony no longer needs to convince anyone to give beneficial treatment to PlayStation because Xbox failed so hard. You can complain about exclusivity deals Sony made with a few publishers all you want, the fact is that only Microsoft is to blame for not developing any 1st party games people want. Xbox flat lined so hard, it’s a genuine “why waste money on porting and QA?” at this point.
Games like God of War drive platform sales. The few good games out of Microsoft are usually better on Windows anyway, so really no need to get an Xbox at all.
Yes, I’m a gamer and I’ve heard of actually anticipated games, even if a game might not be my cup of tea. One trailer had 15 minutes of fame three years ago. Amazing. Current anticipation is way down. They can’t even get 100k of YouTube subscribers.
I give you that years ago IGN may have managed to generate a bit of hype but recent uploads on their own channel are anything but “hotly anticipated”. If that game was actually “hotly anticipated”, the hype would have persisted and not winded down to “mildly anticipated”.
Your Steam account is tied to backed up cloud saves. I wouldn’t just give away the account to a complete stranger. Also Steam’s EULA forbids it, so any problem might lead to the account being closed.
FYI: Cross-platform cloud save sync is currently not working. Developers are working on a solution. Workaround is to enforce Proton.
Edit: The workaround I’ve read somewhere is wrong. Currently the only workaround is to either manually copy the save data or to set up a 3rd party sync solution (which for Steam Deck means to enter desktop mode).