What are the reasons for why Microsoft wanted to lock down consoles to only run signed code? As a games console manufacturer, what are the business reasons for doing so? Thanks
Essentially as the platform owner, you want to ensure games sold for the platform "just work", and if you have a bunch of third parties running bad software, consumers would lose faith in the platform altogether.
To add a little more color to this, it wasn't solely to ensure games worked. The lesson of the video game crash was that third party publishers would make knock-off games similar to popular titles and flood the market with them at much lower cost - sometimes as low as $5 vs for a $40 for a top title. These games were generally low budget and rushed to market to capitalize on looking like a top-selling title - while being just different enough to (hopefully) avoid trademark infringement.
These games usually "worked" (as in booting up and playing), the issue was more that that they were just bad versions of the title they were ripping off due to having little development time and minimal play testing along with poorer artwork and fewer levels (thus saving ROM memory). The flood of cheap, bad versions of more popular games is credited as the main factor that killed the Atari VCS.
Another big factor was that later console manufacturers charged game publishers a license fee for the proprietary library code required for a console to run a game. This fee could allow manufacturers to sell game consoles at cost or even below cost and recoup the lost profit over time in the per game license fee.
This wasn't always the case in the early days of hardware cartridge systems. Initially, some early console manufacturers didn't charge much more than a game publisher could buy blank cartridges for from a third party. Some other manufacturers chose to generate revenue simply by building more margin into the wholesale price they charged game publishers for blank cartridges. Of course, when console manufacturers started increasing their cartridge profit margin, game publishers were motivated to use third party cartridges - which led to console makers deploying "genuine hardware" checks or, later, disc checks and encryption. Nintendo popularized enforcing their business model both technically and legally (by requiring an IP license). Today, console manufacturer business models rely on 1) Collecting per game license fees, 2) Blocking piracy, 3) Limiting game supply.
There is a lot of interesting history around how game console business models and the legal landscape evolved over time. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Games_Corp._v._Nintendo_....)
A big draw as well is that people can't (within the economic viability timeframe of the games/console) hack the games on a console, meaning you get a much more predictable online experience than you might on PC.
Not quite. You (were? I don't know if this is changed) limited in how much of the hardware you could access: it wasn't 100% access. Enough for most homebrew, emulators and so on, but it wasn't carte blanche "replacement for a dev-kit" access.
IIRC the homebrew you can run is mostly UWP stuff? But if you want to launch a _game_, built for an Xbox, it requires to be in the program.
Still great, and good enough for most use cases
Famously the reason no one ever used Microsoft Windows.
Microsoft in its early days invested a shit ton of money and effort into backwards compatibility testing and fix development. Up until Windows 7 you could be reasonably sure that any piece of software from the Windows 95 32-bit days would still work without major issues - even 16-bit software would run under a 32-bit W7 host, only W7 x64 finally dropped support for that.
Nobody is buying consoles for the hardware. 99% of the product is software. The accounting that you are using, a popular one, is so opppositely-informative that people who make consoles - and smartphones for that matter - clearly do not make decisions with it. It is 200% wrong to characterize it as dumping. Nothing is being dumped.
Here’s a simple idea for you: show me the vibrant market for Xbox 360 2005 era computer hardware. There isn’t any right? What about Xbox One 2013 era? And yet we still play games that were developed earlier than 2013, like League of Legends. The product is software. Nobody loses anything by being unable to run Linux on 2013 hardware today, and nobody loses anything by being unable to run Linux on the Xbox One in 2013 because, if they wanted cheap computers then, they had plenty to choose from!
This makes zero sense. Both have existed simultaneously forever, and hundreds of millions of people eagerly buy both for the same households. I cannot understand your point of view here, other than invoking a word "dumping" and "anticompetive" that you are using 200% wrong. Consoles and open platform PCs do not compete with each other.
> In both software and hardware the open PC platform is far more competitive which drives value for consumers.
The market for high budget single player games exists solely because of DRM protected consoles. So this category of product, that people eagerly have paid for for decades, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, would cease to exist if you required console makers to allow people to bypass DRM. Ask 20 people in the game industry and 19 would agree. I understand the core and spirit of what you are saying, but it is reflecting your aspirations for a world that doesn't exist. Markets aren't art exhibits!
The Witcher 4 is a high budget single player game and sold 30 million copies despite having no DRM. I don't think you're familiar with the games industry.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/ps3-manufacturing-costs-do...
Rent seekers don't do anything for your benefit. The definition of false economy.
The only difference between their "Proprietary product" and a PC is DRM.
Another possible (even worse) future could be cloudification of everything. Enjoy your thin client.
Of course software is bigger than entertainment which might represent a problem. We're increasingly societally locked into this digital shit.