> Nobody ever accused Microsoft or Sony of "getting to decide what games were allowed to be made" because they strictly controlled what works are allowed on their platforms. There are always other platforms one can publish on.
Yeah because you could publish a game on tons of different platforms. There was competition. Sega, Nintendo, Atari, Sony, and that was just consoles, they too competed with Microsoft PC, then Microsoft XBox which was the same company but introduced additional competition nonetheless, and on top of all that, you could publish a game for Mac. And then there were the arcades, and gaming moreover competed with games that were electric but analog, like pinball and bowling. And that's excluding gambling. Another popular form of video games that didn't involve the companies I mentioned was watching a single viewer play a video game using a telephone as a controller and watching on a local TV channel, with thousands others watching the kid play, there were more platforms right there.
There was competition, and it was culturally accepted that if you wanted to show something to the world, there were many ways to go about it, but you had to go through a publisher, or a distributor, something.
Yeah because you could publish a game on tons of different platforms. There was competition. Sega, Nintendo, Atari, Sony, and that was just consoles, they too competed with Microsoft PC, then Microsoft XBox which was the same company but introduced additional competition nonetheless, and on top of all that, you could publish a game for Mac. And then there were the arcades, and gaming moreover competed with games that were electric but analog, like pinball and bowling. And that's excluding gambling. Another popular form of video games that didn't involve the companies I mentioned was watching a single viewer play a video game using a telephone as a controller and watching on a local TV channel, with thousands others watching the kid play, there were more platforms right there.
There was competition, and it was culturally accepted that if you wanted to show something to the world, there were many ways to go about it, but you had to go through a publisher, or a distributor, something.