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Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

Yes, 100%. But the size of the corp dictates the priority of the action. That puts Apple and Microsoft at the top of the list.

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Each of these platforms' value propositions from earlier days was that some day it'd profit from its own controlled ecosystem. This is how they got investment. Apple and Nintendo in particular each held out a long time protecting the brand. There'd be no point in doing that if you're forced to support the competition anyway.

And in each of these markets, users have other options if they want full hardware control. Clearly it wasn't a priority for many of them.

There's a long runway from "early market" to "total domination" to make money for investors. Nobody is shutting down the ability of limited or emerging markets to extract value, but once you reach Apple's size it's an entirely different story.

The runway is less than one human generation, or less than a home mortgage period. Some of these ventures are unprofitable for a decade. If an investor isn't thinking domination early on, they're thinking of getting it to the point where another investor would think that.

Perhaps profits-at-the-expense-of-everything-else is _not_ the right way we should be running the show.

Perhaps it is. The EU can see if their way helps them, though.

If you really believe that, I'm not sure what to say.

So you can cheat against console players? Every device capable of doing computing doesn't need to be regulated as a general purpose computer.

I’ve yet to see any company solve the cheating problem in any game. People forget that Valve gave up on the ring0 stuff not because it was unpopular, but because it stopped being effective.

It is not necessarily about "solving" but more about minimizing. I encounter far fewer cheaters on the few consoles I do game on than on the online PC games I play, largely because the barrier of entry to doing cheats on those consoles are much higher. It is not impossible to run cheats on the console but requiring hardware mods, not being able to run certain patch levels, risking blacklisting that hardware identifier, etc. mean far fewer people are willing to do it compared to just running another executable on your computer before you launch the game.

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