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> can you reasonably stop selling it for consoles and paying the vig to the console makers by telling people to play it on their phone instead? Didn't people d

> can you reasonably stop selling it for consoles and paying the vig to the console makers by telling people to play it on their phone instead? Didn't people do this a ton? It started with a trickle of poor but sellable ports of stuff like Call of Duty to the Wii and Grand Theft Auto for iPhone. All of that stuff was signed-off by publishers. The ports came through even faster on Nintendo Switch, despite it being both less powerful than most phones and a different architecture from most consoles at the time. Then there's even the Steam Deck, which crossed the rubicon of running Windows games without Windows. At no point during any of that history did publishers tell people to stop playing the "inferior" ported version. Some might even say they didn't care, as long as you bought a full-price copy of the game and enjoyed it. So... yeah. Consoles will exist, and people will port games to them because gamers will buy and own them. But smartphones are simply more popular, and the software pipeline required to get PC games running on the hardware you already own and use exists and is usable today. Console releases haven't correlated with quality since forever, the majority of people I know would rather play Fallout: New Vegas on a phone than Fallout: 76 on a PS5.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
Old or low-resource games are a different market, which phones can participate in. But if there wasn't a separate market for console games then consoles wouldn't exist -- people would just use their phones instead of paying hundreds of dollars for a separate device. That people will pay money for a console when they already have a phone is a simple proof that the phone can't replace the console. If consoles were required to be open then they'd likely merge with PCs, since a console is basically a PC but closed. This is another aspect of the anti-competitive nature of the industry -- if consoles were "basically a PC" and open then a non-Microsoft console would be a Linux PC sitting in a hundred million living rooms, which is a threat to Microsoft's desktop monopoly, and a major reason they created the Xbox. By subsidizing the sale price of the Xbox and making it back by shaking down game developers, they make an open console an uphill battle because it would have to charge more for hardware and less for games, which reduces initial adoption and the network effect, pressuring its primary competitors to do the same thing and be closed. And then you get game developers targeting PlayStation instead of SteamOS, the latter of which would have made the games also run on any other desktop Linux, and general purpose software developers targeting Windows but not Linux because there aren't a hundred million general purpose Linux "consoles" in living rooms.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

Old or low-resource games are a different market, which phones can participate in. But if there wasn't a separate market for console games then consoles wouldn't exist -- people would just use their phones instead of paying hundreds of dollars for a separate device. That people will pay money for a console when they already have a phone is a simple proof that the phone can't replace the console. If consoles were required to be open then they'd likely merge with PCs, since a console is basically a PC but closed. This is another aspect of the anti-competitive nature of the industry -- if consoles were "basically a PC" and open then a non-Microsoft console would be a Linux PC sitting in a hundred million living rooms, which is a threat to Microsoft's desktop monopoly, and a major reason they created the Xbox. By subsidizing the sale price of the Xbox and making it back by shaking down game developers, they make an open console an uphill battle because it would have to charge more for hardware and less for games, which reduces initial adoption and the network effect, pressuring its primary competitors to do the same thing and be closed. And then you get game developers targeting PlayStation instead of SteamOS, the latter of which would have made the games also run on any other desktop Linux, and general purpose software developers targeting Windows but not Linux because there aren't a hundred million general purpose Linux "consoles" in living rooms.