Couple of problems here.
You forgot about battery life, which is the primary reason to lock a platform down.
The supposedly empowering aspects of instability and insecurity make the PC a shitty platform, too.
None of those have anything to do with games.
The 'closed app store model' is a million times more open than the preceding models. Ever try getting a game published on a console, or preloaded onto a pre-iPhone mobile? Or even Steam, right now.
Battery life is a special case of priority, throttling, and supervision, which with a proper security model is solvable with quotas and queues.
The PC's security problems are not what makes it empowering. They're an ugly side effect of the PC's relative openness. A good solution would preserve as much of this positive functionality and openness as possible but would fix the messy interaction problems.
This is a solvable problem. It's just harder than feudalizing everything. Instead of solving the problem, mobile OS developers chose to punt on it and neuter the platform instead.
I don't understand what you're getting at by comparing the PC to consoles or console-like ecosystems like Steam. Those are more like the mobile app store ecosystem. In fact, I've long seen mobile devices as effectively consoles.
It's just a console ecosystem with an app store interface and ranking system that creates a race to the bottom in price, which brings us back to the OP...
Android is a much more modular OS than Windows, whose source I can audit, and whom I can make derivatives of like Cyanogenmod.
On the desktop, I can have interpreters and sandboxes. The modern web app is its own desktop app store sandbox. You could even argue the JVM and .net / Mono runtimes are their own sandboxes, if you want them to be.
Meanwhile, Linux distros have had the curated software distribution problem solved for years. You will never find fraudulent or unapproved software in the official Ubuntu, Fedora, or Arch repos, yet you can install whatever you want.. if you want to.
And you could make an app platform on top of it, no problem. ChromeOS is freaking Gentoo. It was built with portage and now its app store is the Chrome app store.
But arguing software freedom has been a losing battle for years. Even when consumers can see the consequences - the evolution of fenced off playgrounds with no room to innovate - they just don't care.
I mean, hell, we still don't own our hardware. How many of us are running open source firmware? Even if our mainboards are free, our hard drives run proprietary microcode and our graphics cards run binary blob initialization code. Our cellular data radios are proprietary black boxes by design. The evolution of the app store is obvious in hind sight considering it all.
For the first point, perfect is the enemy of done, and that's (to me) quite evident in the progression of iOS and Android over the years, those platforms having different thresholds for what they think is acceptable for release.
I understand that security problems are not the empowering aspect; that was snark. Still, I don't see how these aspects relate to games.
The comparison between console ecosystems and app-store ecosystems is meant as a counterargument against your feudalist claim. We've never been freer as we are now on iOS and Android, and as you say, it didn't solve anything. And with me not seeing any restrictions on these platforms relevant to /games/, then that leaves a totally unsatisfying argument.
> We've never been freer as we are now on iOS and Android,
That's the part I just can't fathom. You do not control your device. You have to hack it to get "root." There is one app store, and all apps sold within that store must give a percentage (30%?) to the lord of the app store kingdom. The app store can remove any app for almost any reason, and can in some cases even go out and uninstall that app from users' systems. At the very least it can be made uninstallable for new devices and users at any time.
How is that not absolutely feudal? How is that at all free?
We're getting way off into areas not relevant to the OP, but I'm just in a continuous state of amazement at peoples' acceptance of this. It almost seems as if people have been brainwashed into not seeing it... it's like that scene in that old film "They Live" where the guys have the fist fight over putting on the glasses. When I talk about this I feel like that. "Put on the damn glasses!" "No! Mobile is the future!"
Sure, it's not as free as platforms in niche markets. I don't have access to much of the equipment I own, but I don't care about a lot of that. My phone falls into that category.
Anyway, it's all about relative freedom. The 30% tax is not the 5% royalty of yesteryear.
$100 to push to the App Store is not the $30k to licence developer kits of 10 years ago.
A market of hundreds of millions is significantly higher than anything ever seen before.
iOS' ecosystem is experience rapid Glasnost. Android's is tightening up. Both are immensely more free than anything else, historically and presently. This is a question you have to look at over time.
How is this not exciting, and at the same time, completely compatible with the existing and unthreatened harder-core PC market?
I think the OP's problem is we're living in a dark age of gaming, much like the Atari bust in the mid 80s. New ideas will arrive and fix the gaming aspect of this.
