Not saying this is a good excuse, but I suspect it’s related to DRM / cheating.
Video game consoles exist for the sole purpose of playing protected content, and they rely on part on verifying things haven’t been tampered with to discourage creating.
That’s the slipperiest slope ever. All modern computing is full of DRM. I watch Netflix on my Mac and game on my desktop, should I have no rights?
Again not saying it’s a good excuse. You’re right that modern computing is full of DRM, but unlike a computer, an Xbox is literally just a DRM box. They rely on their hardware DRM to prevent piracy.
Not sure if it’s still the case but back in the day, people would install aftermarket disc readers in early 360s specifically to allow it to play unprotected game discs, so anyone with a DVD burner could burn a pirated ISO onto a disc for their Xbox
That’s a very weak argument. I get where you’re going with it. All moderns computers / devices are DRM first.
The PS4 and Xbox One and later are quite literally x86_64 architecture. They run either Windows NT kernel or Unix Kernel. Albeit custom OS variants that are functionally labelled “forks” for all intents and purposes. Games can be be ported between them and PC with ease due to this nature. They play movies and music whether it be streamed from an app, a DVD/CD, on a USB device or internal drive. They can browse the web using a web browser that’s part of the OS.
Traditional computers have had hardware based DRM for decades. There’s nothing really special about consoles having it too.
Consoles take the same approach as Apple has with iOS. They don’t want you doing anything with it that they haven’t approved. A walled garden to exert control.
Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo just lobbied really hard and padded pockets to get their exclusion.
Video game consoles exist for the sole purpose of playing protected content,
Consoles have never been good at handling protected content. I’m pretty sure they have higher piracy rates than PC, purely because PC will emulate them.
Pretty sure the main reason has always been form factor and self-contained. People get consoles because they don’t want the setup that a PC entails. That and up until around 10 years ago maybe, PCs were prohibitively more expensive than consoles.
But hell, even back in the 90s my first experience with Pokemon was on no$GB
