alright,.. you guys have all gone crazy and are completely obfuscating the heart of this arugment. allow me to elucidate the situation.
there are TWO, count them, TWO complete seperate and competing angles to the situation.
1. The first party platform.
A monopoly (or just a very large marketshare) in first party platforms does BAD things to the first party platforms.
it can lead to third parties being taken advantage of as was seen by nintendo in the snes era. it can also lead to the consumer being taken advantage of as was seen by sony's arrogance to think they could push a $600 blu ray player onto gamers and MS's arrogance to think they could mandate an online check-in DRM system. or it can lead to stagnation... nintendo innovated with the wii because they needed to do something to turn their fortunes around. ms innovated with their online service when they needed to distinquish themselves upon entering the market. sony innovated with ps+ when it needed to turn it's sinking ship of a ps3 around.
COMPETITION IS GOOD FOR 1ST PARTY PLATFORMS
2. The third party developers.
Fragmentation caused by a lot of competitation in first party platforms does BAD things to third party developers.
Going from 1 platform to 2 platforms DOUBLES the quality assurance process which is an expensive compenent of software developement. going from 2 to 4 redoubles that cost again. too many platforms and your budget will completely disappear or your budget will bloat to unreasonable proprotions to where costs cannot be recouperated. All else equal,.. 4M sales from an exclusive release is MORE PROFITABLE than 1M sales spread across 4 platforms (xbox, playstation, wiiU, PC).
TOO MUCH COMPETITION IS BAD FOR 3RD PARTY DEVELOPERS.
i have gather terabytes of data and spend the last few years mining that data creating complex models and algorithums to determine how much competition maximizes the amount of pleasure that can be extracted from the video games industry.
3. exactly 3.
