I hear u on this, I'm just speaking to the real world use case. I get that Valve could shut off Steam tomorrow and that would be it, but the odds of that happening are low. What I'm saying is, if I usually take 2 months to finish a single-player game, and the game regularly goes on sale for $20, I'm always going to buy the game on Steam vs. Game Pass. That way, if I decide I want to play it 3 monrhs later, I don't have to pay ANOTHER $10 to Microsoft to access it.

And if Valve takes the game away in 10 years? That sucks for game preservation reasons, but realistically I almost never play games that are more than 10 years old.

In the 80s and 90s, third party exclusives were a necessity because you were making games for sets of hardware that were capable of dramatically different things.

I tried Fedora briefly before switching back to Ubuntu. It seemed like it was still forcing updates in a Microsoft-esque way that Ubuntu does not. On Ubuntu, most updates can be applied without a restart, but Fedora seemed to bundle a bunch of updates together without really telling me what was in them, and I believe it had an install step during shutdown or startup? Which is another thing I hated about Windows. Some of this could be false, as I have an atrocious memory, and some of it could have been user error, but the first foot that it put forward reminded me too much of Windows. On Ubuntu, I just disable snaps.

problem with this is the size of these companies, sony is not a megacorp in same tier as MS and they likely wouldnt be able to allocate funding for large gaming acquisitions such as EA

Being the market leader, Sony will have a much harder time making larger acquisitions than MS did, and this ABV merger didn't exactly breeze through.

but the later Minecraft games that were made after the Microsoft takeover have, for the most part, only come out for Microsoft platforms.

Today I've learned that the Nintendo Switch and PS4/5 are Microsoft platforms. Pretty much every console Minecraft game has made its way onto these systems.

Minecraft Dungeons, for instance, never came out on GNU or macOS.

Works just fine on Linux using Proton (they could totally prevent that if they wanted to) and Apple is pretty hostile to macOS gaming anyway.

That's not true at all. Minecraft Bedrock Edition, Minecraft Dungeons, and Minecraft Legends are all available on both Playstation and Nintendo Switch. Bedrock Edition is available for Chromebooks. Dungeons and Legends are both on Steam and will run through Proton.

Bedrock Edition is not on Steam and unavailable on Linux and Mac. Dungeons and Legends aren't available on Mac. In a strange twist, Education Edition, which is just Bedrock Edition with classroom oriented features, is available for Mac though.

Thankfully Minecraft Dungeons does work via Proton, though I'm not super familiar with macOS so I'm not sure if Proton works for macOS given that Apple's platforms use Metal rather than Vulkan (though I hear a translation layer is being worked on for Vulkan->Metal).