[nemothekid]

Limiting piracy is the ongoing reason, but there is also the historical reason of the Video game crash of 1983 which led to Nintendo's Seal of Quality.

Essentially as the platform owner, you want to ensure games sold for the platform "just work", and if you have a bunch of third parties running bad software, consumers would lose faith in the platform altogether.

[mrandish]

> ensure games sold for the platform "just work"

To add a little more color to this, it wasn't solely to ensure games worked. The lesson of the video game crash was that third party publishers would make knock-off games similar to popular titles and flood the market with them at much lower cost - sometimes as low as $5 vs for a $40 for a top title. These games were generally low budget and rushed to market to capitalize on looking like a top-selling title - while being just different enough to (hopefully) avoid trademark infringement.

These games usually "worked" (as in booting up and playing), the issue was more that that they were just bad versions of the title they were ripping off due to having little development time and minimal play testing along with poorer artwork and fewer levels (thus saving ROM memory). The flood of cheap, bad versions of more popular games is credited as the main factor that killed the Atari VCS.

Another big factor was that later console manufacturers charged game publishers a license fee for the proprietary library code required for a console to run a game. This fee could allow manufacturers to sell game consoles at cost or even below cost and recoup the lost profit over time in the per game license fee.

This wasn't always the case in the early days of hardware cartridge systems. Initially, some early console manufacturers didn't charge much more than a game publisher could buy blank cartridges for from a third party. Some other manufacturers chose to generate revenue simply by building more margin into the wholesale price they charged game publishers for blank cartridges. Of course, when console manufacturers started increasing their cartridge profit margin, game publishers were motivated to use third party cartridges - which led to console makers deploying "genuine hardware" checks or, later, disc checks and encryption. Nintendo popularized enforcing their business model both technically and legally (by requiring an IP license). Today, console manufacturer business models rely on 1) Collecting per game license fees, 2) Blocking piracy, 3) Limiting game supply.

There is a lot of interesting history around how game console business models and the legal landscape evolved over time. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Games_Corp._v._Nintendo_....)

[maximilianburke]

I think it's also worth pointing out that the console makers (and developers) pour a lot more resources into ensuring that the products released for their platform are of a suitable quality than, say, phone app store gatekeepers.

A big draw as well is that people can't (within the economic viability timeframe of the games/console) hack the games on a console, meaning you get a much more predictable online experience than you might on PC.

[droopyEyelids]

There was a period of time when this was true but at least with nintendo, the eshop is full of shovelware now

[NotPractical]

Microsoft actually reversed course on this. You can make a one-time purchase to access "developer mode" and then run whatever you want. It's been suggested that this is the reason there's been less interest in hacking the Xbox. Ironically it also means you have more computational freedom on the Xbox than on the iPhone/iPad.

[girvo]

> then run whatever you want

Not quite. You (were? I don't know if this is changed) limited in how much of the hardware you could access: it wasn't 100% access. Enough for most homebrew, emulators and so on, but it wasn't carte blanche "replacement for a dev-kit" access.

[Narishma]

I don't think it much different from the official games, which also don't have full access to the console.

[klausa]

The "not-behind-the-paywall-and-NDA" GDK version is severely more limited than the invite-only GDKX.

IIRC the homebrew you can run is mostly UWP stuff? But if you want to launch a _game_, built for an Xbox, it requires to be in the program.

[girvo]

No it was quite different (again, unless they changed it? They might've, I'm long out of this scene). UWP apps had a lot more restrictions on them, the SDK was different, and you didn't have the full consoles hardware to use, compared to the "behind the NDA" SDK: it'd run slower, basically.

Still great, and good enough for most use cases

[akira2501]

> and if you have a bunch of third parties running bad software, consumers would lose faith in the platform altogether.

Famously the reason no one ever used Microsoft Windows.

[mschuster91]

> Famously the reason no one ever used Microsoft Windows.

Microsoft in its early days invested a shit ton of money and effort into backwards compatibility testing and fix development. Up until Windows 7 you could be reasonably sure that any piece of software from the Windows 95 32-bit days would still work without major issues - even 16-bit software would run under a 32-bit W7 host, only W7 x64 finally dropped support for that.

[markus_zhang]

I think they even run windows 3.1 games back then. It is very impressive. Actually I think some still do. But the ones using WinG do not, like Fury3.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Yet Microsoft bought Bethesda