But I can buy the same game on all three major consoles. Plus PC. Plus Steam, GOG, Humble, Epic (where I can get it free), or even pirate it with little trouble (if I didn't have qualms with the ethics).

None of these stores do my email, dating, finance, math, fitness, banking, web. They're not fitting the computer role like laptops and smartphones.

Games are toys and have lots of healthy competition. Smartphones are monopolistic dictatorships.

Famgopolies are secretly colluding to take over everything and tax it. To make computing encumbered, unfree, unrepairable, and shackled in surveillance.

Who gives a damn about video game toys when the most important devices in our lives are turning into Big Brother meets Stalin?

90's Bill Gates wishes he was this evil.

Google and Apple need to be split up.

The argument of Sony and Microsoft not allowing 3rd party stores on their consoles is an open and shut case. There's no discussion needed there. Everyone already acknowledges that's the case. So the conversion moved on to a more interesting topic: whether Sony and Microsoft have a duopoly. The GP claimed they did and I was making the point that they don't.

The confusion here is you're reading my comment thinking we're discussing a different topic. So it's not me who missed the point :)

It's still more nuanced than that. As I've mentioned in my post, Microsoft have been pushing hard the PC side of Xbox. So it's really more Playstation, Xbox and/or PC. Then if you introduce the PC you have Steam and all the other stores too.

Also don't write the Switch off for serious gamers either. Most gamers I know who have an Xbox or PS also have a Switch. Why is this important? Because if someone has £50 to spend on a game, they cannot spend that same £50 on both the PS/Xbox and the Switch stores. So even if the Switch occupies a slightly different market, it's still taking money that might have gone to Sony or Microsoft.

It definitely seems like a lot of people have Xbox and switch or Playstation and switch whereas only the most dedicated gamers have both an Xbox and a Playstation.

There's a massive difference between gamers who don't have 200 hours a month to invest in the latest AAA title and people who are just as happy playing Candy Crush. This is the genius of the Switch: it's accessible enough that casual gamers are happy to take a punt, while still having enough content on there to satisfy some of the more hardcore gamers too. But don't mistake it as a device aimed specifically for hardcore gamers, if anything it's more of a joke to many of them due to older generation titles (like Skyrim) getting re-released and often with worse graphics yet sold for £50 while the same game is available on other platforms for <£10. This mocking gets said time and time again by some serious gamers.

You'd be surprised. If the other consoles are out of stock then those gamers might already have a PC or an earlier console (eg PS4). So they might instead buy a Switch despite it not having Detroit nor Gears knowing they already have a platform that does play those games.

A fair number of gamers are disinterested with the latest generation because they don't see the envelope being pushed enough (eg for many, the previous generation largely looked "good enough") but Nintendo offering something totally new (portable plus their own exclusives) offers something more for their money.

Maybe in a couple of years time if/when AAA titles stop offering releases on the PS4 we might see more people pining for a PS5. But a lot of the muted reactions are precisely because there isn't an urgency to upgrade.

Now you could argue that even if they don't replace their PS4 with a PS5, they're still spending money with Sony. But if these gamers also have a Switch -- which many will do -- then their gaming budget is now divided between Nintendo and Sony. Eg if they have £50 next week to buy a new game, they can't spend it in full on both the Playstation and the Switch. Even if they only spend half that on the Switch, it's still a 50% drop for Sony.

So Nintendo might target a slightly different market but they're still affecting Sony and Microsoft's games sales.