looks down.

Oh.

Oh my.

a budget gaming pc that requires minimal upkeep or research into picking parts or putting them together

if that isnt a good enough reason, counterpoint: maybe consoles just have no point then

Consoles are by far the best bang for your buck right now in terms of performance vs cost. A decent GPU alone today costs as much as a PS5/Series X. Unless you need a powerful desktop for other purposes, it's cheaper to buy a console and a decent laptop separately than it is to build a gaming PC.

You're not making a counterpoint, you're making THE point against exclusivity

So, if you're only buying a console to play that one or two games, they are objectively not a good choice to buy for you. Or if you have multiple consoles just to play all the exclusives, not for any actual feature of the device or cause it does something specific you want (or has accessories others don't, like VR), same thing. This promotes innovation.

If games weren't exclusive, you could just buy whatever console fits your use case the best, offers the best performance, or the cheapest for more casual gamers who don't care about performance who just want to play something every now and then. That's good for consumers.

So what you said isn't a counterpoint at all. It's just your reason for buying them I presume, actually proving they are bad for consumers especially in your case. If they had no exclusives, you'd just play whatever game you want on whatever platform you chose, losing nothing.

but then they would have to compete on hardware

Won't anybody think of what that costs the poor billionaires?

Not the other person but no. Microsoft really needs more exclusive games to their system. I
Want the three major systems to do well because that means there's lots of good games to play. But it seems microsoft have forgotten about making good games leading consumers to choose Sony.

The PS5 is still difficult to even purchase in the first place, isn't it?

And if Playstation wanted to make inroads on PC, Microsoft has a leg up in the PC market as well by dent of being Microsoft and making the OS, so Xbox controllers are more plug and play than Playstation ones, they can optimize performance better, etc.

Overall I don't think Microsoft becoming even more of a monopoly would help anybody but Microsoft.

I don’t see how market consolidation benefits consumers. I’m not sure that I understand the point you are making?

If the FTC has any credibility at all, or even an illusion of credibility, at least that would be too big an acquisition.

About 14 billion short at current. Who know what a buyout would actual take beyond the regulatory requirements.

governments would never allow that, and im sure Microsoft is aware that they would never allow that

I wish it was illegal to do that. It's blatantly anti consumer. Exclusivity does absolutely nothing good for consumers and only harms them by pushing them to have to own multiple, otherwise redundant consoles.