[bogwog]

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.

[hnlmorg]

> 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.

[xandrius]

Game consoles are not biological beasts which decay as a matter of nature or fact.

They are tools, toys, they are devices. I can still play my PS1 as before, I just need to pop in a CD and I'm good to go.

[hnlmorg]

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.

[kelvinjps10]

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

[TylerE]

Every ps4 game works on ps5.

[newaccountman2]

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.

[p1necone]

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.

[dogwalker5000]

I’m just saying, you can stop buying new games. If enough people do it, Sony will fold.

[chrisco255]

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.

[nirvdrum]

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.

[L-four]

They have a monopoly on disks for the PlayStation.

[tomnipotent]

It's amazing how many people throw around the word monopoly without remotely understanding what it means.

[scheeseman486]

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.

[miki123211]

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.

[tomnipotent]

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.

[tomnipotent]

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.

[scheeseman486]

Let's look at Merriam-Webster

'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.