This was inevitable once ports looked the same and ran the same. Doubling your customer base, without developing the whole game twice? Obvious choice for any third party. First-party developers have taken longer, because their parent companies primarily own them to promote a hardware business. Microsoft’s hardware business has become vestigial. It always was, to some extent; the Xbox project was a 1990s scheme to PC-ify the console market. It worked.
Consoles don’t exist anymore. Do you want the green AMD laptop, or the blue AMD laptop? Even Nintendo rebadged an Android tablet. You can release some crazy new hardware unlike anything else, but the only third-party games will be multiplatform hits that run like garbage. Like on early PS3. The Helldivers 2 PSN fiasco sure looks like Sony found out how profitable they’d be as just another publisher and the answer scared the shit out of them. Without that service, they don’t have a platform, anymore. They sell a popular model of an IBM compatible. Asterisk on the compatible.
Nintendo can get away with that shit forever, because they own Pokemon. I don’t know how much longer you can cosplay that sort of first-party importance, on the strength of Horizon and… Death Stranding.
Software has won.
This was inevitable once ports looked the same and ran the same. Doubling your customer base, without developing the whole game twice? Obvious choice for any third party. First-party developers have taken longer, because their parent companies primarily own them to promote a hardware business. Microsoft’s hardware business has become vestigial. It always was, to some extent; the Xbox project was a 1990s scheme to PC-ify the console market. It worked.
Consoles don’t exist anymore. Do you want the green AMD laptop, or the blue AMD laptop? Even Nintendo rebadged an Android tablet. You can release some crazy new hardware unlike anything else, but the only third-party games will be multiplatform hits that run like garbage. Like on early PS3. The Helldivers 2 PSN fiasco sure looks like Sony found out how profitable they’d be as just another publisher and the answer scared the shit out of them. Without that service, they don’t have a platform, anymore. They sell a popular model of an IBM compatible. Asterisk on the compatible.
Nintendo can get away with that shit forever, because they own Pokemon. I don’t know how much longer you can cosplay that sort of first-party importance, on the strength of Horizon and… Death Stranding.