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anigbrowl 4 hours ago

I have mixed feelings about this campaign. Their main ask is that Sony give up exclusivity for the Playstation store, which prevents anyone selling PS games without Sony's approval (and a 30% cut of revenue generated); their main argument is that Sony has total market domination makes it subject to specific EU rules.

I would like if there were other options besides the PS store for PS software, because the hardware is very nice and there are a lot of cool things developers could do with it if they didn't have to worry about compliance with Sony's narrow view of what constitutes digital entertainment and how big a company has to be to be an acceptable media partner. For example it would be nice to use a Playstation for non-game activities (math explorer, sci-fi style news dashboards, weird physics simulations) or have the choice to connect to the Criterion Collection and enjoy obscure media curated for other film snobs like myself, or...

On the other hand, if any malign software infects individual users' Playstations, or undermines the experience of other users who interact with the first group - eg participants in multiplayer games who are impacted by cheating or some sort of exploit - who is going to get blamed? Of course, it will be Sony. They could say 'well we warned you not to use XYZ app store and the only reason XYZ app store exists is that EUrocrats forced us to allow it on our beautiful platform', but no matter who is actually at fault it would be a huge hit to the Sony brand.

Say what you like about the economic and philosophical shortcomings of walled gardens, the reality is that most people find them preferable to a Plants vs Zombies type free-for-all, and I find it hard to blame companies for making a profit by catering to the garden-enjoyers rather than the wilderness-enthusiasts. The latter are after all free to just use some other computing/entertainment platform like Xbox, Steam, etc.; the argument made by campaigners is that they want all the quality of engineering, manufacturing, and access to top games that Sony makes available now, but also the possibility of breaking the hardware and/or the business model that brought it to market. I really think that when it comes to consumer technology, if you don't like the way the company operates you should just not use their products.

braiamp 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think that potential reputational damage should be used as an excuse for monopolizing software distribution. Sony can have a tightly curated PlayStation Store and build its reputation around it without that necessarily implying that nobody else may sell software for the hardware. "Bad third-party software might exist" (we have examples of that existing on the PS Store anyway, but I digress) is an argument for giving consumers ways to distinguish trusted software from untrusted software, not automatically an argument for eliminating the competing distribution channel altogether.