The solution is them releasing a store on other operating systems there’s nothing keeping them from releasing their apis and game engines in windows or Linux so they can easily release the ps5 store for general purpose PC.

Oh that’ll never happen, it would pretty much mean Sony voluntarily killing the market for PS5. And it’d mean a major overhaul of how the PS5 works if they don’t want to develop for multiple software platforms in parallel. The PS5 doesn’t use D3D or Vulkan, it has its’ own graphics API right now.

It would all be great, but I can guarantee that Sony will never go for it. They’d be spending a bunch of extra money just so they could reduce their long-term income.

Steam is as open as it is because gaben has a hard limit on anti consumer lock in. There’s no steam exclusivity because steam itself doesn’t have any only steam for x years because money policy. That comes directly from the top.

That’s funny, because next year is the 20th anniversary of the first ever store-exclusive PC game, Half-Life 2. I still remember the Steam logo anal penetration gif from those days, because everyone hated the forced Steam client install (and its’ frequent updates) so much.

Epic’s bullshit one year exclusivity trash caused a backlash that I still haven’t forgotten. No amount of free games will let a lot of us allow that camel’s nose into our tent.

It’s trash that they did this to games that were originally going to be Steam games, but I can’t fault them for this. It’s the only way to enter the market and even that was not enough. Steam’s hold on the market, while largely built on Gaben’s pro-consumer policies, is so big that if Gaben were to die, the next owner of the company could do absolutely anything short of breaking into your home to smash your PC and 99% of their users would never migrate, even if a better platform appeared. That’s because nobody wants to buy games from multiple stores and everyone already has all their games on Steam. GOG has only gained the marketshare it has because it has found a very specific niche - DRM-free games, mostly older ones. Neither Epic nor Steam are going to do that because they both want to be the general “any game you want” store and most AAA games’ publishers aren’t going to allow DRM-free to happen.

There’s not going to be a 3rd major generic PC game store to compete with Steam and Epic anytime soon. Several billions of dollars worth of exclusive deals and free games would be needed to start one and now that people have shown their rightful hatred for exclusive deals, I don’t think anyone wants to attempt it again. Sure, you could do better than Epic did by prioritizing a better user experience and giving away even more free games and buying or building several studios to churn out dozens of first-party exclusives instead of paying for exclusives, but you’d need more money than Epic has burnt on it, because now you’re still competing with Steam AND everyone already hates the idea of a store that isn’t Steam. And Epic had Fortnite money AND Tencent money to do it.