@Kriven "not one single conversation on the Internet has ever been constructive."

Thank goodness you refuse to buy into hyperbole!

It's not about having third parties muscle console vendors into a standard. When third parties have that level of power over platforms, EA is what you end up with. That's been their end game since the 80's.

That still side steps the issue though. Even if that were successful, and UbEAvision 2k got to dictate what the console platform would be. Why would Nintendo stay in the business? Why would Sony stay in the business? Nintendo at least would have reason to be a major publisher/studio. Sony ONLY has their game studios to push their ecosystem. No ecosystem to push, no reason to hold onto studios. And for MS, it would be status quo...but no reason to push "XBox" they could just push Windows. What you're really talking about is a practical end of consoles entirely.

Fair point about PlayStation and exclusives. But it still misses the point. Sony holds onto Naughty Dog, Guerilla, etc, etc to have bargaining chips with which to sell Playstation, not because they really want to be a games publisher as a business goal. If you take away the ability for them to use those games to sell Playstation, they either jettison the studios, or jettison all of it. Sony of all companies needs to hold onto the status quo of the exclusives. Nintendo technically could endure as just a publisher, but I don't believe they have any intention of doing so.

I get what you're saying, and as a consumer that would be great. But the real practical matter is consoles exist as exclusive-driven closed ecosystems. To change that to an "open platform", none of the current console vendors have any incentive to continue at all. It's really a call to end consoles, and just make PC/mobile gaming the standard.

There's another dark side to that. Without the platform holders sinking mega budgets into games to recoup with the lock-in with hardware, either budgets shrink, or like current third party games, those games join the modern world of mtx & loot boxes to survive.

Could we all still game on Alienware type boxes made by random companies with our Steam/Epic/Origin/UPlay/GoG/Stadia/XCloud accounts and subscriptions? Sure. But couldn't we already do that and just skip Sony and Nintendo's exclusives which likely would cease to exist at least in the forms we know them in that world anyway? Those games exist for the point of selling the platform. They don't exist without the platform. Nintendo being the lone partial exception that could become a "5th major publisher", but there's a lot of business problems with that idea, and instead would probably become a subscription service + store/launcher with exclusive games, anyway.