Ashtear

The concept of “firing your customers” even became part of marketing strategy in the last decade. Amazing what kind of nonsense bubbles up out of the muck when markets see less competition.

To preserve a right to ownership. But you knew that already.

Simple, you buy competitors’ products and you vote for policymakers that commit to regulatory policy.

I’ve always been a PC gamer, but for a long time there, consoles were affordable enough to put in for just a few exclusives. Then I gradually went from a couple consoles to one, and then I started skipping generations and now it’s at the point where my last participation in the console market was getting a used PS3 at the far end of its life and getting a Switch gifted to me a couple years ago. I was expecting to skip PS4 and get a PS5 after the price dropped, but yeahhhhh. I’m definitely still interested in exclusives (the Shadow of the Colossus remake, The Last Guardian, Bloodborne, and now Intergalactic), but at this point, there’s no viable scenario were I’m in the Sony ecosystem in the foreseeable future. Fumito Ueda’s next game being announced for PC was shocking to me.

Even if we’re talking marginal cost differential for used games, a lot of consumer psychology is just feeling like they are getting a good deal. PC gaming is on the rise–and I don’t mean that in a cute, Lemmy Linux gaming sort of way, it’s genuinely a market shift shown across multiple indicators–there’s growing hostility towards walled-garden ecosystems, and Nintendo’s still going strong. Sony needs some sort of carrot, sheesh. Woof.