Consoles are dying.

Yeah, the PS5 is doing alright, sales-wise. But even its fanboys say 'it has no games.' What they mean is: almost every game is on every relevant platform. Multi-platform development won. Even hardware has to reflect this: Sony and MS had three lockstep releases of nearly-identical AMD laptops. Nintendo's latest money-printing handheld is literally an Nvidia Android tablet.

Everything is a computer now. Some of them are needlessly locked-down.

This market where every game has to be certified and pressed three separate times in different-colored boxes will not last. It is an absurdity. Sony finally recognizes this, after Microsoft starting doing weird shit with the Xbox brand. Because really - the Xbox whatever-it's-called selling half as many units as the PS5 is still a metric shitload of units. Microsoft still has recurring revenue from millions of customers and the apparently-standard one-third gross cut from retail sales. The Xbox is not hurting.

Microsoft is acting weird because the Xbox was always an effort to PC-ify the console market. They aimed for something 360-ish, whiffed, and released a literal Pentium 3 PC. Then they did the 360, as a generic compiler target, and it got all the good ports. It also gave indie developers something novel: money. Once the Xbone launched, the PS3 had recovered, but only by helping PC devs deal with their wonky vector processor. And the Kinect fucked them. But it was already too late: the PS4 was just a PC. The PS4 Pro and PS5 couldn't even tempt gamers to "wait and see" or jump ship for instant gratification, because MS launched similar machines at the same damn time.

Helldivers 2 finally showed Sony how much money they could make, being just a PC publisher. They desperately do not want to be just a PC publisher. Their overreaction is a desperate effort to protect their platform - because being a platform is all they have. They didn't design whiz-bang hardware that allows amazeballs games like nothing else. They don't have Nintendo's damnable first-party appeal. They need their releases other platforms to coerce people into entering the Sony ecosystem.

Meanwhile: Microsoft is teasing Halo on Playstation because it makes no difference to them. Microsoft doesn't give a shit if all the money in a game sale goes to Sony and Valve, so long as the game's running on Windows. They want a market driven by developers, developers, developers, because they know they can dominate it.