It would certainly fundamentally change their business model.

XBox already seems to be changing, though, with the majority of their games also on PC and even supporting streaming to mobile devices, without a console at all.

I could see Playstation moving towards that model as well, focusing on the games rather than the hardware.

I sure hope not. As I age, the value prop of consoles is, I don't have to mess with settings or diagnose problems or sacrifice goats to the "did this update break something" gods.

It just works. I can just play games.

This was true when consoles were offline only and games on physical media... I'm not investing into newer ones unless they can do the same.

I agree with the sentiment, but in my experience that's just not true. [1] The PS4 and PS5 are nice and pain free. The Switch even more so, because the games will run right off the cartridge without needing updates. They have available updates, but the version shipped on the cartridge is 100% playable.

[1] With the exception of the XBox because Microsoft can't get their shit together.

> The PS4 and PS5 are nice and pain free.

Are they, though?

Turn them off for 6 months, 1 year, then come back to them.

Wanted to play Fifa with a friend that had a... PS4. OS update, game updates, the whole shebang. It wasn't much better than Windows + Steam.

Your Windows + Steam experience sounds a lot smoother than mine if all you have to complain about is updates.

I experience breaking updates all the time on PC. "Wait, why is this game crashing now?" "Wait, why have all of my settings been reset?" "Wait, why has the framerate tanked since the last update?" "Wait, why isn't my controller working anymore?"

All of these happen to me on Steam games. It's infuriating. I'll happily take the console experience of updates that don't break things.

It won't - without root piracy will still be extremely hard.

I think the biggest change we would likely see is that classic-game-rereleases would evaporate, as it would become trivially easy to install emulators.

It already is on XBox, so no.

Disagree. “Trivially easy” must be set in common sense to the average consumer. It must be something that they can do easily without any guides or tutorials. Changing my name on Xbox is trivially easy. This[1] is not.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/xbox-apps/devki...

Disagreeing with your disagreement. How "easy" a tech-related task is to accomplish is determined by the users skills and experience, as well as software/hardware usage patterns that they've learned over the years. Official guides/tutorials for enabling/disabling various functions exist for Google Play/AppStore too. Does that mean that one of the easiest ways to acquire apps that have ever existed is...not easy? Because there really isn't much difference between following a "how to login into my Apple/Google account" tutorial and "how to enable an XBox feature".

I'm 100% confident that if Apple told EU they were complying with the new law, with a system where you either have to run only sideloaded apps or only official App Store apps at any given time, but could reboot from one to the other, the EU would say "very funny, here's your fine".

There is a developer mode[0] so maybe that's their angle; right now nothing changes for regular apps but I can see a future API where banks, competitive games, etc. check to make sure you're not running any sideloaded code (not that that's a big problem, as iOS 15 is still unjailbroken due to the extreme advancements in the OS security model).

0: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/enabling-dev...

If you're expecting the user to follow a tutorial to do some thing, that thing is already a niche of a niche.

Never knew that kitchen appliances are "a niche of a niche" with their instruction manuals.

Not piracy, but the loss of revenue from selling the games themselves.

Not even close.

If they don’t get a cut of third party game revenue then making a console is a huge, risky investment for what? The opportunity to sell first party games to a smaller audience?