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".
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...
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