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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the value from preventing a customer from modding the device. Presumably, the customer gets more value out of the modded device, which means more sales to the device vendor.

The IBM PC was a runaway success because it was user moddable. IBM failed to recognize this with their follow-on PS/2, which was locked down. It flopped. DEC's Rainbow PC flopped because they tied it to proprietary floppy disks.

Chrysler was loved by hotrodders in the 60s and 70s because the company even published extensive manuals on how to hotrod them to various levels, and supplied the parts!

I put my money where my mouth is, the D language is 100% open source.

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>the customer gets more value out of the modded device, which means more sales to the device vendor.

Not sure about the modern xbox, but a lot of game consoles have traditionally been sold at a loss with the expectation of making it up on game licensing fees.

Making more sales at a loss without a significant enough increase in licensing revenue equals a bigger loss. And that's before accounting for the higher support costs of people with incompatible 3rd-party hardware calling Xbox support.

> I don't get the value from preventing a customer from modding the device.

For many, having locked down consoles is a feature not a bug. It massively reduces the odds of coming across people running cheats in online gaming. It still happens, sure. But in the end it is far less common when cheating requires buying hardware modifications from potentially shady marketplaces, soldering things on to the board, potentially breaking your hardware, and potentially blacklisting your hardware on official matchmaking systems.

You're never going to get to zero cheaters, but if you make it more difficult to cheat and make it easier to blacklist expensive hardware it'll massively reduce the odds of your player base encountering cheater in an average match. Encountering less cheaters increases player satisfaction and keeps players playing your games.

I didn't buy a game console for it to be a general purpose computer to do whatever I want, I bought a game console because I want to play games. If I want a general purpose computer to hack around with I'll go buy a Pi or an ESP32 or some other SBC instead of a Switch or an Xbox or Playstation.

Part of the value is also providing assurances to game publishers that their games will be harder to pirate. With the 'rampant' (in many publishers' view) piracy scene on PC, publishers would prefer not to have to also deal with the piracy problem on consoles. By taking on that burden, the console manufacturer makes their platform much more attractive to develop for. It also lets game devs make more mistakes without having their dirty laundry aired out for the world.

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