you don't expect Netflix to put its original programs on Hulu, do you?
Exclusives should go away? so you want microsoft to port thei games to ps4 and sony to port their games to xbox? it makes no sence.
Exclusives are what makes people decide which hardware to buy, same way sony makes tvs and then makes some sony tv exclusive features to have some advantages over the competition, same way for iphone and etc,etc just becuase they dont use games as exclusive stuff they always want to have something the competition doesnt to make their hardware more appealing, its maketing 101.
with very few exceptions movie studios and record companys dont produce hardware so there is no reason for it to be exclusive since they dont do hardware at all.
also tv companys already do that hulu,netflix,amazon and such wont put their exclusive content on the competition, every tv channel has exclusive content so you watch their channel or pay a subscription and they wont all just put their shows and movies on the competition, they want you to watch their ads or pay their subscrition so they gain money.
Exclusive content is what makes money if all tv channels played the exact same programs all networks would just die lol and be only one.
Also games are coded in diferent languages you can play a movie on preety much anything but a game developed exclusively for ppc then it would need work and such to be played on arm and so on, its a totaly diferent thing they cant just release a single game CD/download that would work on all OS that exist, unlike with music or movies.
Sony make DVD players and have a studio. Loads of game companies seem to want to be mixed media companies these days as well. Amazon produce their own hardware, any company out there could easily gate off an android type device. Equally film studios make their own hardware, rigs and more. Development costs and running costs for some of them is not entirely out of line with some of what game console development likely runs.
It is not a terribly valid comparison though from where I sit, and I do expect things to still come to a common format like DVD or something. Not to mention while I don't expect them to offer things up to a different service I do expect them to all interface with some kind of reasonably common hardware. Maybe you are content to have the game consoles count as common hardware by themselves but seems like a pointless.
I agree that hardware types still make a vague sort of sense, which is a bit of a pity really. It is however nowhere near as special as it once was. Likewise if devs want to spunk millions and millions on things for said exclusives then carry on* but in the lesser worlds, which still produce fantastic games, then porting seems like pointless busy work. Also everything has lua these days, every has or could well have some Java, and both of those (and more that are similarly on everything) can be used to make very fine games. On videos I don't expect my ageing core2 laptop to decode a 4K H265 encoded file so your "plays on everything" concept does have holes. Not to mention there would not be different processors, or at least functionally different processors, in this no exclusives world as everything would have a baseline to work from.
*personally I tend to laugh when developers cry and say games are costing more and more to make. There is some as I imagine general wages and overheads have gone up, though at the same time what once required a top tier coder can probably be farted out by Johnny just graduated Java school and wouldn't know an opcode if they tripped over a manual of them, and hopefully one day will be as easy as writing a novel is today. To that end games don't necessarily cost that much more, they just choose to spend more.
I overheard a conversation the other day saying "this phone is a samsung like yours" which sounds strange to my ears as it is all android either way.
I needed a DVD player a while back. One had a nice inbuilt amplifier with 5.1 output. That was a deciding factor beyond one was Toshiba and this was Hitachi.
Time was such things made some vague sense, and theoretically you could have a killer app. I consider the practice anti consumer, though far from needing any kind of legal legislation against it. Likewise I am all for competition between devs, to have it happen in hardware just seems like an antiquated concept.
This is all getting kind of disjointed but hopefully I have made my case.
taking out all diversity on the technology market them, lets all choose to use pcs with x86 and kill everything that runs on ppc,arm and such becuase that is what needs to happen...
doesnt make any sence at all.
My AMD/ATI card and my Nvidia card, theoretically also my Intel card, all speak directX and opengl quite happily. I have not needed a specific card really since the death of 3dfx and maybe s3 before that. Some might be optimised for one or the other but that matters little.
Not to mention I am banking on the future being in programmable processors or the descendants of FPGAs.
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