1. Sony will never, ever make any of their exclusives available on Xbox. Ever. The only one they ever did was MLB The Show, because the MLB forced them to. Its a one-sided affair and the only one to truly benefit is Sony, not Microsoft and not gamers. Microsoft only partially benefits in that it will drop its hardware division entirely and focus only on games publishing and maybe streaming.

2. Added value locked to hardware doesn’t make too much sense. What service could add value that would not be available on another platform, that would unlock special features not present in other hardware? Better graphics/faster storage? People don’t generally care about that if the cost is more or if it is not a very big gap. Plus, it is hard to get someone to switch brands for just one or two different features.

3. If another company was to copy the Switch, they would have to sacrifice hardware. They could not make something with the same power as a regular home console, and would therefore remove itself (like the Switch did) from competition with other home consoles.

4. Gamepass is nice for people that don’t mind another subscription service, but I hate subscription services and I hate not owning what I pay for. Sure, the TOS in games say I don’t own it (that needs to change), but its not the same as me paying for a service that can remove any game from my access whenever it wants. Additionally, I don’t really like XCloud. Its a cool feature for people that have a smart device and cannot afford an Xbox, such as is common with people in some South East Asian regions or other places, but for people like me that already have an Xbox, I literally never use it. I don’t even use the feature where I can remote play on my own game console over the internet. I don’t need to. If I want to play a game, I either wait and play at home or I look at what I have installed on my phone because I probably won’t have a lot of time anyway.

In the long run, I think that console exclusives, while they seem anti-consumer, do serve an important purpose in a business sense of keeping a healthy competition between console makers. What should NOT be allowed though, is Sony’s practice of paying developers to NOT port their games to other consoles. If a console maker wants a game to be exclusive to their system, they should pay for the game’s entire funding cost, or a very large portion. Not paying a tiny cost to lock the game off of another platform for enough time that all interested parties bought a PlayStation. Nintendo, as much as I dislike them these days, shows how to do this properly.