Sony faces another class-action lawsuit over PlayStation Store prices and monopolistic practices
Sony faces another class-action lawsuit over PlayStation Store prices and monopolistic practices
According to the legal representatives of the 'Fair PlayStation' campaign, at least 1.7 million Dutch PlayStation owners pay too much for their digital downloads. Economic research shows...
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I thought recent rulings talked about Consoles as a special class that was exempt from being forced to have third party stores. Was this EU only? I found it notable, because I think if iOS is forced to have third party app stores, consoles should be too.
I don’t have explicitly what you’re looking for as I am not a lawyer, but game consoles aren’t a general-purpose computing device (despite theoretically capable of being one if appropriately jailbroken), and as such, prior case law for PC doesn’t apply.
iOS/Android tend to be classified a general-purpose computing device because it does all the same things a PC does (or did) and more. It plays games and does banking and plays music and browses the web and displays pictures and movies, etc etc. For some, it’s their primary and only computing device.
game consoles aren’t a general-purpose computing device
I know that’s the legal argument that manufacturers make, but it’s always been bad faith. Long gone are the days when a console does one thing: play games. Now they stream, have web browsers, social media, apps… they’ve been general purpose for many, many years. Being locked down anti-competitively is not an excuse for something to be locked down anti-competitively.
I agree with your argument overall, but I think it would be reasonable to say they are broader-purpose computing devices now, and are not yet general-purpose. Consumers don’t have an expectation to reach for their game console to do an arbitrary thing. They generally can expect their phone or laptop to.
“There’s an app for that” just isn’t true for huge swathes of apps on almost all consoles.