Imagine if Netflix removed Netflix off of everything to sell you a Netflix box. On the real though, it's only natural when it comes to the video game console business.
This is pretty much how the Roku box became a thing. They were working with Netflix to create a Netflix box but Netflix decided that having a Netflix box may harm their ability to get Netflix on other platforms. Roku themselves have played with their digital stores but looks like they believe it be better to be a media distribution agnostic platform rather than potentially putting off Netflix/Amazon/yadada
TL;DR I don't like exclusives because I think the hardware platforms are minimally different compared to each other or to general purpose PC's and mobile devices. It's a lot of electronic waste to be locking down general purpose computing hardware to approved only software. Rather Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo all have their own stores, peripherals, minimum specs than locked down hardware. I don't like numerous pieces of hardware locked to a specific software platform and exclusives to those hardware platforms. Tried xCloud yesterday. Now I'm a believer in the future of xCloud, PS Now, Stadia. This console generation I'll buy hardware but in 7 years I might be only playing games on PC/Android/Roku. It'd be cool if they all went the route of having the subscription service availible as well as single license purchase. Trade offs in quality but I find this preferable to buying numerous hardware for access to exclusives. Streaming worse than not streaming but really don't like buying so much hardware when I can buy one hardware and have access to all the game libraries. It's a worse version of emulators on PC/mobile/jailbroken consoles but now you get the latest games as well. Amazon has game studios. If they buy more, Google starts buying and they're all making platform exclusives, platform agnostic services is superior to me than platform specific to hardware. If Apple does platform specific to hardware I ignore them
Long version of opinions on exclusives:
I'm not a fan of appliancized computing but realistically companies are going to want to have a platform where they can monetize licensing and transactions of any content on it. So I buy them. I buy consoles and other specialist devices but for the hardware of a lot of devices, the only thing not letting them be general use is the software that restricts it to approved only software. It's so much duplicate materials and labor and time that exist not because another platform does not exist that is capable but because it is more valuable for a company to make money on hardware and software while trying to build up a moat that is their walled garden. All the platform holders would like to be Apple and IOS and Apple would eventually want IOS and iPad Pro to supercede laptops. All these schemes I see brought up about PS Now or Game Pass on other companies platform devices is just further towards a closed market general computing platform.
My ideal world would be something like SteamOS. In the background is a Linux distribution (SteamOS is Debian) and the launch scripts and UI is geared for display type (TV, Phone, Tablet, Desktop). The hardware vendor is just selling what would count as the minimum spec PC for their store. The hardware vendor would provide any of their additional developer tools through the store or its baked into the operating system. But what I would want is always that underlying open platform there so you can install any other store. Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo. Sell peripherals but I do not like how many consoles and controllers I have stacking up over the years. Obstacles would be changes in the underlying hardwares instruction set but still, reduced materials being used in the world by decoupling the software and hardware platform.
If games do go the way of PS Now and Game Pass xCloud someday, then console hardware becomes a smaller niche. If it was something like on PC where games may be exclusive to Steam, Origin, Epic, Blizzard; it would be whatever. How it is on consoles sucks. You're buying general purpose hardware that has been appliancized to a specific software platform. If you want to play software on another platform, then you buy the hardware that is closely related but has locked to another software platform. I don't know if Apple put's any show or movie they've bought the rights to onto other platforms at least for digital rent, but they're just about the only one that I know successfully don't put their video/books/music distribution apps on other platforms while everyone else that's tried has caved to being hardware agnostic and getting their distribution on as many devices as possible.
I know hardcore gamers talk down on PS Now and Game Pass xCloud since there's latency and compression artifacts. It's far from ideal conditions. I've read people argue about how DLSS and algorithmic recreation of detail takes from the creators vision. A lot of people don't need ideal conditions. It's like how in film almost everything is made for the big screen. Even if it's rights are purchased by a streamer and it doesn't get a general theater run, most filmmakers want it to run in a festival or be made available for theaters to license. But a huge portion of people would rather watch on their own TV. It's not a multi hundred inch screen in a dark room where it's socially looked down on to do something else like looking at a phone, internet browser in another window or monitor, cooking with TV in background. Streaming which is more heavily compressed than home media which is more compressed than DCP which is more compressed from the masters.
There's a lot like me that are looking at PS Now, Game Pass xCloud, Geforce Now, Stadia, etc. Back in 2000/2001 era, love the games but hate the hardware situation. Dreamcast, Xbox, Playstation 2, Gamecube, Gameboy Advace. Sega drops out the PSP comes out. Nokia N-Gage failed. Now not as bad as then in terms of number of closed platforms and their exclusives. Still how I look at it now is, I can use PS Now, xCloud, Geforce Now, Stadia on and Android and PC. I bought Game Pass yesterday to try out the streaming on Android and it's pretty damn solid for playing on a wireless connection router in another room. Compression artifacts frequency depending on connection but it worked well. Tried Elder Scrolls Online, The Outer Worlds, and Gears 5. Gears 5 had bad input lag but I'd like to try again on a hard wired connection. Not good for competitive gamers, but there's a lot of us that aren't playing competitively. The rest I was happy with.
At this point thinking of buying an Xbox Series X just for the blu-ray player and so I can play Fable 2 and 3 since I skipped those back in the day and they're not on the cloud service yet. But if I buy a Xbox Series X, I probably won't buy a PS5. Might try PS Now for Horizon Forbidden West. In 7 years with better compression, AV1,AV2,VVC; maybe I'll have better internet then too. Maybe the servers that run the games permeate across more data centers and latency improves just by more localized servers.
Maybe Microsoft and Sony's future platforms include planning for running on the general use server hardware that you'd get from AWS, Azure, Akaimai, Google. I'd be curious to learn how they host their streaming platforms now. I see things where they've adapted their consoles for server racks but I'd expect those to be different to run software for distributing load and the overhead that comes with it. It's not going to be 15 million subscribers, 15 million consoles with another device to offload the translation of input and streaming. Operating system would be virtualized. User specific storage linked some way. To me this screams for making it more generalized to none custom hardware to reduce cost and streaming becoming a more normal day 1 distribution option (not necessarily subscription. single purchase or rental). Use less specialized hardware and now more server farms across the globe become viable and now people are higher likely to be routed to nearby server
