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Comment by olliej | Hacker News Reader

PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, sega, ... are the same:

You can only sell for those devices with manufacturer licensing (that includes profit sharing and mandatory annoyances like “achievements”), and consumers can only buy games licensed by those manufacturers.

The only difference is that PC developers haven’t experienced that before. It seems like this would have been established in the 80s/90s, so I’m surprised we’re getting to court - is there a change in judicial philosophy?

That said, as far as I can tell every platform charged the same ~30% so I’m sure any company can simply point to the entire market as having established that under fair conditions (after all, if there was a cheaper platform surely they’d prioritize that?)

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One of the major difference here is that game platforms have a relatively less power than Apple/Google in their current business practice. It's usually game platforms that tries to attract game developers/publishers into their platform (sometime with strong incentives and even subsidiaries) to win the market and publishers are the decision maker; the same thing doesn't usually happen in the app store case. Game devs don't have much incentives to sue platforms as long as there's competition between consoles. Note that things were different in the NES/SNES era and there actually was a number of antitrust cases for Nintendo.

But honestly, I feel that competition within a single game consoles should be allowed. This doesn't have to take a form of side-loading (which obviously has a significant downside of piracy which hurts game devs/publishers even more than monopoly/monopsony) though.

Or maybe we could get side loading on console.

The fixed hardware that is long-lived and affordable is possible because the hardware manufacturer subsidizes it, especially at the beginning. If they were not able to rely on money from game sales, the hardware would be much more expensive.

An alternative way for companies to make money manufacturing gaming hardware is to keep the prices low until there are a lot of great games for the system, and then jack up the hardware prices later on.

So you might want a hardware standard that multiple companies could produce, which games could interface with and be portable between..

Eventually it just turns back into PC gaming.

And it is anti-competitive business model. By selling the consoles at such a low price that you cannot make a profit on them and then relying on a volume of game sales to effectively extract your rent from, it by design limits the number of companies that can compete that way because there is a limited number of game sales.

The PS4 was as expensive as a regular PC so any idea how much the latest consoles were actually subsidized? I assume Sony and Microsoft can negotiate with AMD for giant discounts so IMO they made profits when selling the consoles but I do not know if they would admit this.

Other issue I have with digital games is that the physical game is the same price but the digital game I do not own(I have less rights) so why don't we get same rights on digital games or cheaper digital games.

You're ignoring the fact that communication is critical in the modern world and Apple has too big of a piece of the pie there and is clearly too powerful in dictating what is happening as well as abusing that power. Also video games aren't critical to functioning in the information age, while communication clearly is.

Although things are changing (platforms have app stores), did't gaming systems traditionally decouple the box manufacturer from the distribution? ie sony made the playstation, and publishers made and distributed the disks?

Of course, everything is changing now. I think the apple app store might have led the way starting ~ 2007 or so.

Game consoles are not an important part of almost the entire population. Smartphones are. Hence, they get more visibility. Moreover, smartphones tend to be more critical in our lives. Hence, they get more priority.

Hence, people might not have thought it was worth it / important before, but they do now.

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