Monopolies are also bad for gamers. Playstation can engage in more anticompetitive behaviour when Xbox ceases to exist.

Only way to improve the situation would be something like a contract where they each agree not to do exclusives for X years or something, then revisit it when the contract expires.

Hah, good one.

All of the platforms make most of their money from digital market fees. Consoles themselves are loss-leaders I believe (at least they used to be). Each of them wants you to be stuck in their platform. Steam has the weakest grip of them all, because you can just go buy your games from another store, but luckily for them, the only other store that's even halfway decent is GOG.

There's very little that can be done about the whole damn thing unless either the EU or the US decides to force console manufacturers to open up their platforms to 3rd party stores. Which, to be clear, I would absolutely love. But I doubt it's going to happen.

Eh, I don’t think so. I don’t play PC games so they weren’t on my mind, and I wouldn’t consider PCs games in the console wars discussion anyway. Could be wrong but could you give some examples of major must have Xbox exclusives?

I don’t like exclusivity deals and platform fragmentation either, I think it’s anti-consumer. But to be fair I don’t think the Microsoft deal is just about that.

Microsoft’s market cap is something like 23x that of Sony’s; the reason they are in 3rd place is entirely down to mismanagement. It’s pretty typical for Microsoft to find themselves in this position in many of the markets they have chosen to occupy over the decades, and so they instead use their deep pockets to buy their way to being market leaders. Microsoft have a long history of using acquisitions to buy out or block competitors, to the detriment of the market.

We saw what happened when Microsoft got a whiff of success in the 360 era. The Xbox One was anti-gamer and anti-consumer, and it didn’t happen by accident: that’s straight out of Microsoft’s playbook.

The increased competition might be nice in the short term, but it gives Microsoft an opportunity to disproportionately influence the gaming industry for decades into the future imo.