What I'm getting from this discussion is that a decent number of people would prefer that these developers and their IPs be eviscerated by big monolithic publishers if it means Microsoft doesn't get exclusivity...because that's sure as shit what's going to happen if Take Two, EA, or Activision get their paws on them. Hell, WB Games isn't even immune to criticism on this front. Under current Xbox, they would more than likely be Avalanche games, Rocksteady games, Traveller's Tales games, Monolith games, but if not? EA games, Activision games, Take Two games. You do not want this. You might think you want this for whatever weird "inside thought only" kind of reason, but you do not. Related: there's a distinct whiff of "I want to play these games but want to never ever be forced to give money to Microsoft in order to play them." Am I the only one getting that from a lot of these comments? Like needing to buy a PlayStation for some games is just how things are, it's PlayStation haha if you wanna play this cool game guess you gotta go buy a PlayStation sport, but needing to buy an Xbox? Out of the question. Like, are you interested in the games, or the specific platform holder? Do they not sell Xboxes in your village? Is your money not formatted for Xbox purchasing? Microsoft is part of the gaming landscape and some of you are gonna need to make peace with it. You can't just shun them until they realize they're not wanted and sadly shuffle off to go sell hawk Office 365 subs or whatever.
That aside, Microsoft is pretty much objectively the only one of the four that would be good for these developers, and yet I still find myself surprised that it managed to pull as much as 70% of the vote from this community. These publishers are as bad as, and arguably even worse than 2013 Microsoft, and people would prefer WB Games go to them rather than a 2020 Microsoft that would let you play the games on PC, or with a DualShock 5 like you want and on any screen that can support xCloud? It's Mind-boggling to me. Consolidation of the industry is bad, I get that, but not every game gets to be on every platform; PlayStation will never be your one stop shop for everything while there's strong competition in the market and there's nothing wrong with that. It would be nice if there were no exclusives but that's just not the reality at the moment, and isn't wanting all games to be on one platform and not the other basically consolidation anyway? I get that not everyone can own more than one console for a number of reasons (budge financial, limited free time, etc.), but wanting all games to be available on a single console is silly given the way console gaming has always worked. Historically, if you wanted the full gaming experience, you needed to have all consoles, and that's not really changing outside of Microsoft's new ecosystem-focused strategy of putting games on PC. So between the four available options, Microsoft is such a vastly superior choice that I'm not even sure why there's a poll, because with the other three, sure, you might still get those games on PlayStation, but given those companies' histories, they might not emerge as games any of us are interested in paying money to play.
side note: stop this Netherrealm/KI talk. Stop it stop it stop it. EW. Double Helix and Iron Galaxy shit all over MK last gen. From sound work to animations to actual combat...Hell, KI dropped trou on SFV from upper Earth orbit in nearly every way, which would've sounded impossible back in the halcyon days of 2011 (especially to me, who always viewed KI alongside other janky 90s fighting games jokes), but here we are. I submit that there's only ONE studio Microsoft should've bought this gen and didn't--and it was Double Helix.
Boy howdy were you ever right about that one
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