Exclusivity and Blocking is not the same. Paying you to put the content only on my platform isn’t nearly as anti trust as paying you to not put your content on a specific platform

Excluding only one is a more minor restrain of trade than excluding all others? I can't agree, though I admit that excluding one looks nastier if only 'cause it's novel. Logically and economically, re competition, blocking seems less nasty, even if targeted.

But that doesn't mean the courts will side with me and not you. Strict logical coherence isn't always adhered to. It's even been called "the hobgoblin of little minds" - so perhaps Emerson would take your side on this.

Imagine you own a mattress store. There is another rival mattress store in your city, and you both compete for customers.

You don't make the mattresses yourselves, you purchase from a manufacturer and sell in your storefront. There are only a few different mattress manufacturers.

Your rival, instead of adjusting prices or organizing better marketing, simply plays the manufacturers not to sell to your store for six months.

Unless you can rapidly find a brand new source of mattresses or have a very healthy rainy day fund, you will likely go under fairly quickly after selling your remaining stock.

This leaves only one store in town, and they can set the price to whatever they want. Now that they are the only established incumbent they can easily recreate this scenario with any new mattress stores that want to open in your city.

Now the people of your city have only one store for mattresses, and have to pay whatever is asked for. This is not because the business did anything especially well to win more customers, or because you did anything wrong. They simply destroyed the competition through anti-competitive behavior and have negatively affected everyone else in your area.

This is why it is illegal.

We agree on all this. But my point is, to make the whole world trek to just your store is not better for competition than to make just those in your city come to your store, logically.

As well, although this may not contradict what you intended to say: patents, for example, precisely grant "the right to exclude." Exclusive territories are a frequent way to do this. So in that case, it isn't necessarily illegal.

Surely they aren't foolish enough to explicitly say in the contract they can't bring the game to Microsoft's platforms? It would just say "no alternate platforms allowed between the dates of ..." or similar?

That would be an exclusivity clause.

Music is a little different because you don’t need proprietary hardware in order to listen to music. Everything plays an MP3. A CD is a CD and all CD players play CD’s.

With console video games, you can’t just pop the game disc into any disc tray that plays games. You can’t run your downloaded Xbox game on the PlayStation. The thing you licensed (since we don’t own them technically) is tied to proprietary hardware.

Imagine if you had to own a Mac in order to listen to your music you bought on iTunes/Apple Music

Microsoft tried that with Zune.[1] It was unpopular.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/support-for-rights...

Man I remember that. Great device if you wanted to tinker, terrible music store.

Both of those formats require(d) licensing didn't they?

Not from the consumer, just the manufacturers. As a consumer you bought a piece of hardware that could read the format and it worked across-the-board. With Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo, you buy the game and not only is it linked to the format, but it’s actually linked to their proprietary hardware. You can’t buy an Xbox game, which is exactly the same as the PlayStation version, and play it on the PlayStation. But I can buy a song online on my Mac and play it on VLC on a Windows machine.

Imagine if any music I buy on bandcamp could only be played via a bandcamp app or software on bandcamp’s proprietary hardware.

Or buying Activision/Blizzard or Bethesda. Game pass is bad news for the industry at large. The price floor will drop and quality will suffer.

Sure, its great for 'consumers', but it won't be long term. Will Xbox require mandatory three year game pass or onstar when you buy it? Would that be an antitrust violation?

I wonder if it is good for consumers though. Everyone I know that has it seems to just dabble puddle deep in game after game now and lose interest. Each person has a very expensive Xbox that they don’t play now. Maybe there is something to purchasing a game that makes you assign it worth. For me, the joy of games is getting deep into them, learning everything about them and finishing them. I have 500 hours in Elden Ring haha. I wonder if the fact that a game is almost free makes people subconsciously think it is worthless.

It's the paradox of choice. The more options you have, the less satisfied you are with any of them, or overall in general.

This breaks down for music because of mandatory licensing