Do you know of any other way for a console maker to make substantial revenue besides, the hardware itself, subscriptions, or games?
I'm talking about you asserting subscriptions aren't "pro consumer". When subscription models objectively offer the most content per dollar spent. There's nothing inherently anti-consumer about Game Pass or Playstation Plus or Nintendo Online. It's up to the consumer to decide what is the best mode of purchase for himself, and if they want that.
When I think of anti-consumer, I think of Gatcha games. I think of all the free-to-play and pay-to-win horseshit on phones. You play for an hour, then suddenly the game is over unless you start plugging virtual quarters into your phone at a rate that would make even the greediest arcade owner from decades ago faint from a loss of blood to his boner.
Genius...your idea for a console maker to make more money is to sell more games, even though there is no way to differentiate consoles this point besides game exclusives and their historical good will.
So if we do away with console exclusives, what is there to differentiate the Xbox and PS5 right now?
Yes, my genius idea for console makers is to make money from the source they have historically made almost all the money from. I know. Mind boggling stuff.
Indeed, exclusives play a role in winning the console wars, shipping more total units, which translates to more total software sales, but even upon winning that, the majority of their games sales is derived from games that are available on other systems. Those systems aren't necessarily competing consoles, but PC, even for first party software (where presumably the console makers enjoy a larger share of the sale's revenue).
But it doesn't matter. They just need to sell more games. Implicitly, you are asserting the consoles wouldn't sell at all if it wasn't for the existence of exlusives. That's horseshit. Because PCs exist. If people truly wanted the best exclusive libraries, they'd all be on PC. PC's historic library, including past exclusives, exclusives to PC or that were on console themselves, dwarfs any console's. Additionally, in the present, you aren't bound to exclusives from one console or another. You can get all of Microsoft's exclusives, and most of Sony's exclusives, too; the latter's 'Console Exclusive' library is larger than their 'Full Exclusive' library, now. And that's just looking at games sold through official channels. You can emulate with cycle-accuracy Nintendo's entire Switch library. ROMs are easy to find. Emulators are easy to run. This extends to any platform. You can run any Android or iOS game.
There's a reason hundreds of millions opt for consoles, and it has nothing to do with game libraries or exclusives. It's ease of use. Plug and play on a couch with a controller. Simple. OS is a pre-optimized Big Picture mode where someone else did all the work setting it up one way, and that's how everyone uses it. One size fits all. Games are the same because game developers only have to accomodate a few very pieces of hardware. Limited, but highly stable. The larger software system is closed-source. Tamp down on cheaters/hackers. Finally, cost. The scale of inventory allows for them to sell consoles at a much lower cost than comparable PCs, and that would be true even if they weren't selling at a loss. Engineers have done the legwork maximizing dollar spent to gaming power. Another thing buyers don't have to worry about handling themselves.
None of that has anything to do with exclusives, and much of that is why so many prefer their consoles. Consoles will always sell for these reasons even as Sony and Microsoft have largely left the exclusives approach, fossil that it is, in the past.
But you didn't think about any of that. You don't seem to think deeply about anything you say in this subforum.
