And Sony and Nintendo aggressively want to push towards proprietary hardware exclusives. Sony has improved in that area, but every exclusive is still a big question on if it'll even be available on the PC and if so when. Just the long release schedule is an attempt to draw more people who can't wait to a proprietary closed ecosystem.

I would argue there's a huge difference between, say, one year of timed exclusivity for one game, versus buying an entire publisher and making every single one of their future games exclusive.

That’s only because Microsoft has no taste and can’t figure out how to actually create an IP.