NGL, I’ve been waiting for this. Yeah, yeah, proprietary expansion, too expensive, but on the Xbox, you won’t (currently) do better.
NGL, I’ve been waiting for this. Yeah, yeah, proprietary expansion, too expensive, but on the Xbox, you won’t (currently) do better.
What are we going to do if consumers still buy that stuff?
Well, they will. Two things drive the trend, in my view:
Lack of informed opinions. If you don’t know that other options exist, you’ll buy whatever because you think it is the baseline.
Convenience. This one is a killer. People regularly give up a lot – even rights – in the name of convenience.
Between those two factors, it’s a hard sell for the average consumer to not support this kind of corpo garbage. A nihilistic view, maybe, but I think it’s an accurate one.
In a similar vein, it’s pretty easy to show someone that consoles have these needlessly expensive proprietary links, plus games which are very expensive for the same reason. But it is very hard to convince someone that the cool thing they saw on TV isn’t, in fact, “cool” because of the aforementioned reasons. And ultimately, people like having cool things, even if that coolness is subjective.
Historically, it’s been a push-pull between groups, but everyone has had a different future. Now that things are being consolidated wholesale – e.g. physical media going out the window because so many are happy to stream and never own anything – it is more necessary than ever to call out #1 and #2, since the market itself is changing for the worse.