Look at sales of the Steam Deck compared to consoles and your prediction falls flat on its face. Sure, it would be nice in theory, but both the Deck and the Gabecube are very niche devices.
It was kind of neat in the beginning, at least in theory - and not just from a consumer perspective: Indies in particular benefited from it, since it raised awareness on their titles in addition to the big bucks from Microsoft coming in:
Based on everything I’ve read, Redfall was pretty much entirely on Arkane, just like, at EA, Anthem was on Bioware’s internal leadership, not publisher meddling. On the contrary, more publisher meddling would have likely made these disasters less likely.
Eh, both the Steam Deck and the Gabecube are far too niche and unknown for that. I’ve used the Steam Deck on public transportation and pretty much everyone assumed that it was a Nintendo Switch at first - and I had to go to great length to explain what it was.
One notable exception (out of a small handful) was a mother who recognized it as something different and asked me a ton of questions about it, because she wanted to reward her studious son (who sat next to us wide-eyed, with increasing levels of giddiness) for his great marks with it.
The number of people doing this is so infinitesimally small that even within the most enthusiast circles, it’s practically unheard of. It’s a footnote of a footnote, at best.
The S rune is not the only issue. By combination of runes, I meant the whole thing. All of these runes have been used by Nazis and extensively so. While the rune used by the SS is the most well known, this is like a best-of of which runes Heinrich Himmler and modern Nazis are especially fond of.
Holy hell, this does not look like an accident. This combination of runes does not just happen. Whoever did this at the company thought they could get away with it.
Has this ever been the case? For as long as I’ve been playing games (early 1990s), there have always been buggy games that were clearly not thoroughly playtested. The difference was that back then, patches were either impossible (console - at best there was a silently patched re-release later*) or required PC players to purchase a gaming magazine to get them (if there were any). Perhaps the fact that it’s now easy to distribute even large patches has incentivized developers to adopt a “we’ll fix it eventually” approach, but I have no actual data on this resulting in worse games on average. If there is an actual measurable decrease in software quality in the gaming world, it could just be that the increasing technical complexity of games makes it impossible to detect the majority of bugs these days.
*GTA San Andreas is one of the better known examples of this. There were game-breaking bugs in the original PS2 release that made 100% completion impossible. Only later releases (and ports) had these issues fixed.
Until they aren’t being offered anymore. On PC, physical games are practically dead and on console, they are only making up less than 20% of sales at this point (which is why both Sony and Microsoft are offering versions of the consoles without disc drives). Not to mention, there’s often mandatory day-one patches in the tens of gigabytes or (particularly on Switch and Switch 2) the physical media only containing some of the game files, requiring a download to play.
Also, the market is already oversaturated. It’s not just that there are too many AAA and AA games; Indies are also struggling, because supply vastly exceeds the demand due to thousands of titles that are published on Steam every year alone, most of which are commercial flops. Only someone with a complete lack of understanding of what’s going on in this industry would want more people and more games.
Sure, I don’t think the Xbox 5 will be a success, but it’s highly likely it’ll still ship far more units than the Gabecube, simply because Microsoft is able to shift more units as a larger organization with more presence everywhere (including in the retail space and online stores other than their own).
The difference is that for an organization the size and bloat of Microsoft, numbers that would make Gabe happy would be disastrous for them.
No consumer actually cares about minute differences in performance (or other aspects) between different operating systems and platforms. People buy the platform that has the games and meaningful features they seek, like for example portability, Nintendo’s second-strongest pull after their IPs. Microsoft is hastily trying to claw back their exclusives after a disastrous abandonment of this strategy, which sent margins down the drain. Yes, this will mean that they’ll continue serving the PC, so you can play most of their games on Valve’s devices or any other gaming PC as well, but once more: Normal people buy what’s on the front page on Amazon or on the most illuminated shelf at their local store.
The overwhelming majority don’t even configure their task bar, for crying out loud. Seeing an unmodified one with the big useless search box, spam widget, applications they are never using is one of the quickest reliable indicators that someone is not a tech person.