Epic already lost the trial in the Apple case. Courts in the US and other countries have treated Google differently as an OS provider to OEMs than Apple as a single vendor.
Would they also make Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft open up their platforms?
Would they also make Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft open up their platforms?
Well, that certainly will bode well for the future.
https://www.wired.com/story/jury-will-decide-if-googles-play...
Google, on the other hand, just got pilloried because they are not the phone manufacturer (for the most post), but instead were using their position as the producers of android to pressure phone manufacturers and companies to not compete. Their own internal docs showed the extreme lengths they were willing to go to stop companies from producing third party apps stores. It was this stifling of completion that just got them reamed by the court
It's quite literally impossible for apple to be do the same, because they've banned installing apps at all on their platform. Clearly the right move for Google would have been to do the same 15 years ago and saved themselves the headache.
Apple doesn’t really make these deals, so they weren’t punished for that.
If it was revealed that Sony gave Epic a special marketing deal to prevent Epic from launching a console, then yeah that would be pretty dodgy!
If they left it alone and all OEMs chose to keep Google play store and billing, nothing would’ve happened.
I know for sure that if it were possible to sideload software onto my Switch or PS5, that would definitely benefit me as a consumer. The fact that I have a reasonably powerful computer attached to my TV but can't install software on it without convincing Sony to sell me a janky dev kit for way too much money is just wasteful.
Just about the only objection I can imagine is "piracy", but the locked-down nature of these platforms has surely not stopped piracy from occurring. Nor has piracy caused the failure of Valve's game store or the downfall of their gaming hardware.
You need a new law to say that.
Google got in trouble for saying that you could do something and then secretly undermining it. Whether or not third-party app stores were allowed on devices was not the core issue.
I suspect they'll end up ruling in favor of Epic, in some limited fashion. But let's see!
God I hope so.
They would not be able to recover their costs early enough in the lifecycle. Which means that the time between console releases would be much longer than it already is.
It also would put Nintendo in an untenable situation since they rely on low price hardware as their differentiation.
At this point consoles have very few advantages to PC. If they got "opened up" it would be zero.
Because Acer, Asus etc could simply come along and undercut them on price and still have access to the exact same game catalog. And then they would each decide to add more proprietary features or add more performance.
And so you've just recreated the PC gaming market again.
What's the issue with that?
Developers certainly have no problem making PC games.
Can you say the same about buying any PC? Will that be true for any game you buy for the next five years?
That will be a much better experience for me as a consumer.
There is no need to open up consoles. You don’t have to buy them. The PC is incredibly healthy as a gaming platform.
Please let people like me who want to gaming appliance have it without screwing it up.
Besides, even if someone somehow forced, say, PlayStation to be cross-compatible with other platforms for some reason - it's not like the issues you described are exactly plaguing PCs nowadays. With very rare exceptions (like ancient or heavily modded games), the experience is pretty much "Press 'Play' on your launcher of choice -> Play game".
How is a market with three competitors, four if you count PCs and even more if you count phones “a monopoly”?
Btw, the judge in the Apple case said that Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in game distribution
That would all disappear if you could side-load any content.
It's the fact that Nintendo, Sony etc wouldn't be able to enforce any licensing revenue since users could just install any game directly.
For Nintendo it would decimate the company since it's their primary revenue stream.
I think the benefit of being in the Nintendo store is far higher than that, and they'd do fine. And they have lots of first party games too.
Random sideloaded games are just irrelevant when people are buying the systems for Zelda and Pokemon.
Nintendo charges 30% on the sale of every game sold.
Looking at the current best sellers [1] they would stand to lose a significant amount of money.
Easily in the billions based on current revenue.
[1] https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/games/best-sellers/#sort=d...