They are a gross facimilie of computer. They waste what could be general usage hardware on restricted functionality all for the sake of maintaing total software control to extort maximum profits out of their userbase. And they can only get away with it by having their userbases - the audience they hold captive is pressure on game developers to have to submit to their rule to access their captive audience.
They are a middle men that parasitizes developers and gamers for the utility of "convenience" but its their market dominance that prevents less heinous alternatives from emerging. SteamOS was the closest we saw and even that Valve wasn't willing to invest that much into given its less profitable than the fully proprietary contemporaries.
Take the switch, if you wanted to sell it as an "open" platform my guess is Nintendo would have to price it $75-100 higher. That's a huge shift in what consumers are willing to buy and my guess is it would be a lot less successful as a platform.
But I know for a fact that since launch the Xbone and PS4 were profitable. They were never sold as a loss leader.
Especially now, after all 3 have been out for years, none are losing money. They are all profitable when sold and then infinite money machines by acting as a tax on developers and consumers.
If wide open hardware and appstore was a recipe for success Android would be a clear winner. However if you want to ship a title where you get the most out of the platform and you can rely on the platform to be stable from both HW and SW perspective then curating that space seems to be a recipe for success.
It's be really neat if all the console hardware was wide open, however there's a bunch of hurdles there that tend to lead towards curated platforms being more successful.
But to be fair the Play Store definitely has more of such low-quality games.
Yet it is still better than not having a net at all, leading to a bunch of "Hello World" games, half finished game demos, copy cats that dilute branding.
Alone on iOS there are around 3000 submissions per month on average, even taking around 50% away for updates, it still leaves us with an enormous amount of low quality games to triage, per month.
https://www.pocketgamer.biz/metrics/app-store/submissions/
Not even the modern variants of Crash!, YourSinclar, Amiga Format can keep up with such submission rate.
What it does do is make it less expensive to exert total control over the associated branding. This might seem like a good thing for customers if this branding wasn't already for sale to the the highest bidder, but it is. The practice of hardware manufacturers paying for exclusives proves this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
Game publishers love exclusives, it means there is no way copy cats land on the same medium.
For example, how Naughty Dog tried to turn Crash Bandicoot into Sony's mascot against Sega's Sonic.
"Crash Bandicoot Co-Creator Andy Gavin: Extended Interview"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSHj5UKSylk
It is ironic how disparate these kind of discussions on HN feel versus the general themes on game developer forums, magazines and conferences.
Same thing with APIs, on game developer universe "what cool things can I do with it", here "boo yet another way for the man to subjugate us".
I personally have avoided many game development communities for exactly the reasons you describe — overly extreme fear of "copy cats" to the point of paranoia, coupled with way too much enthusiasm to adopt certain pieces of cargo-culted technology without considering the question of who will support it and for how long. I think Godot is a step in the right direction, but it will take these companies time to let go of these other APIs that cost them high prices just for the privilege of being able to read the documentation. They are not immune to these price dynamics.
> we already have enough garbage
That's not an issue of NDAs but discovery (or lack of curation). NDAs may exist as a proxy for some companies, but that's still a separate issue that can be addressed in the vacuum.
This is like complaining about what Apple allows or not on their platforms, if you are not happy give your money to someone else.
https://www.gamesradar.com/edge/
https://2020.revision-party.net
Now if you refuse to accept how things work fine, but then do something about it instead of cursing and trolling everyone that actually have experience in the industry.
I don't know, create an association, start a movement or something else.
If no one likes the garbage as you say, it won't be hard to get people to join your cause, after all it takes one person to change the world.
After all you argue against everyone like myself, with games development experience, as apparent in several games related forums on Reddit and who knows where else, and yet don't get anyone to pay attention.
Yes I am perfectly alright defending industry practices, try to offend me won't change anything on the games industry.
If you want to change anything start a revolution, writing comments is easy.
After all I would expect that with such energy we would have seen you at some GDC(E) teaching us the true path, leading the way out of the slavery from game development industry practices.
But no, we get rants on online forums instead.