I have lost any kind of trust in Sony. After the massive hacks, shitty anti-customer attitude and now locking the Fortnite accounts, I will never buy another Sony product in the future.
All of these companies have had pretty shitty, anti-customer attitudes. Microsoft popularized pay-for-online services with Xbox Gold and now it's standard to have to pay a monthly fee to play your console games online. Conservely, crossplay would be the standard now is Microsoft has jumped on board when Sony was supporting it last generation. Nintendo hasn't been able to maintain a reasonable level of presense-across-device, creating a massive headache when changing devises or getting a new console and having to repurchase things you shouldn't have to. I can't really see the justification for not buying a Sony product but continuing to support Xbox or Nintendo given all of their attitudes over the years.
I get the whole 'dominant position' argument. It just seems dumb to me to behave like this when you're in a dominant position. Seems that big corporations learn the same lesson over and over again - in the meantime customers are left holding the bag.
BTW, full disclosure: I'm a Nintendo Switch fanboi, so take everything that comes out of my keyboard with a pinch of salt.
In most other companies, like Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, etc., if you buy a title, you can play it on any platform that supports it. The fact that Nintendo players can't accumulate a library of legacy Nintendo titles and play them on any Nintendo console they port it to demonstrates Nintendo has a strong interest in repackaging and reselling the same games over and over again.
Gamespy and Steam's multiplayer system already did that for free.
> a lot of benefits were realized including centralizing your multiplayer experience (community and content)
Again, same thing.
> not having to maintain multiple subscriptions for different game services
I never needed to ever, except for MMOs, which I was still required to pay for on XBL at the time.
> That is and was worth the premium
No it wasn't, the fact you had to play multiplayer hosted on your own console, hosted on your own internet connection, by software you already bought is ridiculous. They offered "free updates", community features and other services completely free. But, multiplayer, the only thing most of us wanted and none of this "value add", you had to pay.
Because Sony doesn't support proper cross play, among many other reasons they are out.
You haven't really looked at app platforms before, have you. If you buy evernote on IOS, you're sure not getting it on android.
MS is being friendly to it because they're behind. In the Xbox 360/PS3 days, it was Sony asking to do cross-play and Microsoft denying it. Its a PR play, and you're buying it.