This kind of nonsense is why Microsoft will always be in third place. Honestly baffled at their reasoning for this. Why even buy ABK then? Unless this is all some sort of ruse to make sure no one tries to block the acquisition. Oh who even knows anymore.
Here's the deal. Nintendo, quite obviously, will continue to do their own thing and keep that unrelenting tight grip on their software because it's served them well for decades. It's a proven formula that works, just look at those Switch sales. Sony is a company that likes to play dirty and again, it's suited them well. You saw it with Sega where they essentially used nonsense marketing about the "Emotion" chip to somehow convince both gamers and game developers that the Dreamcast was not worth bothering with despite it being a wonderful console. Their current strategy is to spend an unreasonable amount of time, money and effort to make competing consoles worse by keeping third party games off of them which is weird considering they have a talented group of first party developers making games that critics and customers alike just can't get enough of. They could quite easily compete purely on the strength of their brand and the quality of their first party output alone.
This wishy washy "look how friendly we are you guys" approach that Microsoft/Xbox is really into these days? To put it bluntly, it isn't working. I wish they would become way more aggressive and actually try to compete for the simple reason that strong competition only benefits consumers. Because MS is barely putting up a fight Sony are content to sit back and just send dump trucks of money to the likes of Square Enix for exclusivity as a way of "competing" and making well received but in my opinion formulaic games. I'm bored of cinematic third person adventures games the same way I got sick of FPS games back when Doom & Quake's popularity made almost everyone churn out FPS games. I really tried to like God of War but I just hated it. If i never play another third person game where the protagonist is a dad/father figure i will die a happy man.
I'm gonna go back to Sega and the Dreamcast. What did Sega do when they were threatened and working tooth and nail to fight back? They made some of the most spectacular, unique and iconic games they ever made, all of them on the Dreamcast. In the end a lack of cash meant it didn't work out for them. Now imagine if Sony felt anywhere near as threatened, they would pull out all the stops to not only make daring, attention grabbing and wonderful games but also improve their platform to make it so desirable that it would be the obvious first choice for gamers. Imagine the Sony version of something like Space Channel 5 or Jet Set Radio with the production values they are famous for? I can't even imagine how exciting that would be to me. This (I would hope) would then spur Microsoft on to try new things to compete. Game Pass is in my humble opinion one of the best things to come out of gaming since online/broadband became ubiquitous and it only happened because Microsoft fucked up so badly that they needed something spectacular to get some of their customers back.
I want Microsoft to really compete. I thought they were when they bought ABK cause something as massive as Call of Duty being exclusive is gonna sell Xbox consoles. They own one of the biggest games in the world, why the fuck are they not making Minecraft 2 and keeping that to themselves instead of making Minecraft Dungeons that gets released on everything? It just seems like a no brainer to make people wanna invest in Xbox/PC/Cloud. I want them to do something that really makes Sony sit up and take notice. So far I've yet to see anything that would significantly move the needle.
TL:DR: Microsoft need to pull their head out of their arses.
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