Walking away from the closed platform you invested hundreds/thousands of dollars into over the years is a luxury (especially if you were mislead into buying a PS5 with a disc drive thinking it'd be supported at least until the end of the product's lifespan)
Monopolies, anti-competitive behavior, and anti-consumer behavior in general are all bad bad bad. You have to be a very interesting individual to disagree with that.
> especially if you were mislead into buying a PS5 with a disc drive thinking it'd be supported at least until the end of the product's lifespan
8 years is roughly the lifespan for a games console though.
And I say this as someone who hates Sony perhaps more than most, having lived through their the CD rootkit and PS3 OtherOS debacles. And been burned by their substandard yet overpriced audio equipment.
You’re conflating two completely different things.
I’m a retro gamer. I have around 20 systems all hooked up and ready to play from the Atari 2600 through to modern systems like the PS4. In fact I bet I have systems you hadn’t even heard of, and machines that are older than you are.
So I know better than most that consoles can live for decades. But that’s not what people mean when they talk about a consoles life.
What that term means is the period of time that a console is the current generation (and yes, “generation” is the technical term here and not something I made up).
Also decay isn’t a phenomenon exclusive to biology. Plenty of things which aren’t organic can have a life and decay, even though we know they’re not technically a life form. For example stars. But even technology can decay. Capacitors and batteries are the biggest two killers of old technology, and common problems I’ve had to repair in my old hardware. The laser in your PS1 is also a consumable. I’ve had to replace the laser in my PS1 for that very reason. Solder can crack. Any moving parts like motors, fans, and CD/DVD trays can seize up over time too. There’s also sun-bleaching that happens to white and grey casing too, which is thankfully a very easy fix.
Console is the kind of thing where you upgrade every few years like for obviously games you bought for ps3 or PS4 don't work in the PS5 or Xbox 360 for Xbox one you have to buy one for each console. So people will switch to the competition, you can see on the sales of each consoles where their peak was. People might even get tired of Nintendo,Sony and Microsoft and just go with steam and valve
I agree with your second sentence, and agree that Sony seems like a pretty bad actor as a result of all this, but the first sentence is false and hyperbolic.
It's not a luxury to walk away from a sunk-cost, no matter what % of your past expendable income it represents (I think that was kind of what you were hinting at). Anyone can do it.
Eh I think you're overstating the level of lock-in here. There's nothing about the platform itself that forces you to stay, it's just the games you've already bought. You can keep the system and just stop buying new games on it.
And most people probably don't replay most games after beating them once, for the handful you do want to replay, you just bust out that console occasionally, or you grab them again in a steam sale to play them on PC instead or something.
Sony doesnt have a monopoly on gaming. There is PC, mobile, Steam, Nintendo, Apple desktop, etc. There are also retro games consoles like Mod64. You don't invest in a game console it is an entertainment expense. You can sell your used PS5 if you disagree with the direction.
You can’t export save files on PS5. You can’t transfer licenses, so you’ll have to repurchase any games you want to continue playing. For trophy/achievement hunters, those are going to be locked away. And a lot of the online game accounts are locked to the platform so you’ll have to start any progress/reputation/level over.
Yeah, you can walk away, but let’s not pretend it’s the same thing as buying orange juice at a new grocer because your regular one only sells it with pulp now. People aren’t being irrational in being annoyed by this.
They were using the word correctly, "monopoly" doesn't only mean greatly dominant player in an open market. Current consoles are by definition vertical monopolies.
I think we should encourage this framing of "monopoly" more.
You can be a tiny company and still be a monopoly. If you're the only grocery store in a (walkable) town where many elderly people don't own a car, you're a monopoly. If you're the only company allowed to sell beer at a football game (that doesn't allow fans to bring liquids into the stadium), you're a monopoly. If you're a school cantine, and school rules forbid students from walking out during the school day, you're also a monopoly.
None of your examples pass any of the checks for a monopoly unless you twist the definition of "market" to be the narrowest possible. Situational exclusivity is not the same as a monopoly, and these examples don't pass the hypothetical monopolist test or the cellophane fallacy.
The Supreme Court ruled once on what they consider an aftermarket monopoly against Kodak in the 1990s, but the aftermarket angle on monopolies has been basically abandoned from a legal perspective because it was shaky at best.
Both iOS and Android both generate more in gaming revenue than Sony. The PC gaming market is only slightly smaller than the entirety of the console market. It's going to be very difficult to make an argument that customers don't have reasonable choice, and the recent case against Apple set precedent that owning the single channel of distribution to a product and platform you own isn't monopolistic unless you do shady things like Google did.
Sony's exclusive rights to distributing games on its owned platform and console will not give it pricing power (won't pass SNNIP) or exclude competition.
Sony can be called a dick for what they're doing without it also having to be monopolistic. People are right to be angry and calling them a monopoly over it is being cathartic.
There is no legal, economic, or dictionary definition of monopoly that supports your position. The closest example is "aftermarket" (what you call vertical) following the 90's Kodak SC case, which has long since fizzled out. Monopoly might as well not mean anything if you can define it however narrowly you want.
'1: exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action
specifically : exclusive control of a particular market that is marked by the power to control prices and exclude competition.'
That definition doesn't define any boundaries on to what market a company has control over. A hardware platform like Playstation only has one store, run by the company who sells the platform; explicit control of the particular market, that market being Playstation games. By going digital only, they now have total command of supply. They also explicitly deny competition from participating. They even have a hand in pricing the games sold on the platforms, an ability they're able to leverage because they hold a vertical monopoly.
The issue isn't me or anyone else defining the word "monopoly" too broadly, it's that the frog has so thoroughly been boiled on what we once considered monopolies that we can no longer see a monopoly for what it is even when it's self-evidently obvious. I agree that anti-trust enforcement has become lax, I'm not arguing that it hasn't... but it shouldn't have. It's been about 30 years of letting big tech and media conglomerates do whatever they want and it is time for that to stop, and not just for video games.
They've always had control by licensing who can publish games on their platform. Now that contract with publishers has changed who can distribute. Publishers are still free to distribute on other platforms in whatever formats those platforms allow.
> that market being Playstation games
This is arbitrarily narrowing the definition of market as far as possible while ignoring reasonable (legal) thresholds. Case in point how Apple's App Store was not ruled a monopoly while Google's Play Store was - there are reasonable tests to pass, and Sony's case will land closer to Apple than Google. And a monopoly is not the only form of anti-competitive abuse.
Might as well claim Domino's has a monopoly on Domino's pizza.
> This is arbitrarily narrowing the definition of market as far as possible
No it isn't, it's literally a market.
Dominos pizzas aren't created and sold by third parties. If you're going to make a comparison, try something doesn't so obviously miss the point (though if you want to talk about commercial food supply chains and how that's become almost entirely monopolized in the United States...).
The rest of your argument is basically "the law says so". Not an argument I'm interested in discussing since I don't care. I explicitly want legislative changes.
Monopolies, anti-competitive behavior, and anti-consumer behavior in general are all bad bad bad. You have to be a very interesting individual to disagree with that.