No one's championing for 'trash' of any kind.
Gaming can become much bigger when barriers to entry are torn down. No one buys one box to watch Netflix, and another to watch to watch HBO. Even Apple TV+, from the kings of the walled garden, is available everywhere.
It's even further advanced in music - you get either Spotify, Apple Music or whatever service, and get everything you need.
And it looks very much like a version of the above is coming to gaming. And not before time.
And what is the barrier, exactly? When a lot of these same people are willing to spend hundreds of dollars on clothes they only wear twice their entire lives, shoes they don't even wear, Starbucks that eats up into thousands of dollars per year, and so forth...how is paying a few hundred bucks for a system that'll last them several years too much an asking price?
The technical peak with gaming in terms of immersion, hasn't been reached yet. Visually we are getting there, but in other aspects much more could be done. Technological innovations are the key in pushing immersion forward, but bog-standardizing the tech across the industry, effectively kills innovative advancements towards more immersion because everything suddenly has to be done at the industry level. Unique visions at companies partly spurred on by technological competition, dies. And whatever innovations or changes come about, are dictated by the companies with the deepest pockets, not the best ideas or implementations.
It's funny, because what you describe creates a false perception of a non-barrier for consumers, when it fact it just coalesces market control to a very small number of companies who, in this case, would be the ones with the absolute most money and likely already dominating with market control in other markets. And ultimately, as these companies have no real threats to usurp them, consumer choice worsens.
The "all games everywhere, "pro-consumer", future without boxes" gaming industry is actually the path to where gaming dies a creative death. We're like 50 years out from that type of reality existing naturally.
The war is already over. Microsoft waving the white flag allows Sony to focus on increasing revenue rather than worrying about marketshare.
I don't quite know about that. We don't "actually" know what Microsoft is doing, for starters, especially hardware-wise going forward.
But we'll see what Sony's plans are, in due time. Probably very soon, actually.
