Video game consoles, especially modern ones (the Switch is an Nvidia Android tablet, the Xbone and PS4 are AMD NUCs) are fundamentally owner hostile devices. Their business model is to sell you a computer with crippled software and no ccontrol over it where programming for it requires NDA to get developer documentation.
They are a gross facimilie of computer. They waste what could be general usage hardware on restricted functionality all for the sake of maintaing total software control to extort maximum profits out of their userbase. And they can only get away with it by having their userbases - the audience they hold captive is pressure on game developers to have to submit to their rule to access their captive audience.
They are a middle men that parasitizes developers and gamers for the utility of "convenience" but its their market dominance that prevents less heinous alternatives from emerging. SteamOS was the closest we saw and even that Valve wasn't willing to invest that much into given its less profitable than the fully proprietary contemporaries.
You're missing the fact that the lower costs of consoles(and support surrounding them) are subsidized by the restrictions that you're railing against.
Take the switch, if you wanted to sell it as an "open" platform my guess is Nintendo would have to price it $75-100 higher. That's a huge shift in what consumers are willing to buy and my guess is it would be a lot less successful as a platform.
The Switch is a direct successor in a line of Nvidia tablets that were regularly priced at $200-$250. That being said, I'm not sure about its profit margin.
But I know for a fact that since launch the Xbone and PS4 were profitable. They were never sold as a loss leader.
Especially now, after all 3 have been out for years, none are losing money. They are all profitable when sold and then infinite money machines by acting as a tax on developers and consumers.
The NRE on consoles is pretty high, for the Nvidia tablets all the upfront costs of the OS have been fronted by Google and Nvidia hasn't been able to position their SoCs as a competitive processor given there have been almost no designs aside from their in-house products.
If wide open hardware and appstore was a recipe for success Android would be a clear winner. However if you want to ship a title where you get the most out of the platform and you can rely on the platform to be stable from both HW and SW perspective then curating that space seems to be a recipe for success.
It's be really neat if all the console hardware was wide open, however there's a bunch of hurdles there that tend to lead towards curated platforms being more successful.
Yes, their business model is sick with anti-competitve tactics, DRM and other despicable methods that are all aimed against users and developers. NDA is just some cream on top of the pile of manure.
They are a gross facimilie of computer. They waste what could be general usage hardware on restricted functionality all for the sake of maintaing total software control to extort maximum profits out of their userbase. And they can only get away with it by having their userbases - the audience they hold captive is pressure on game developers to have to submit to their rule to access their captive audience.
They are a middle men that parasitizes developers and gamers for the utility of "convenience" but its their market dominance that prevents less heinous alternatives from emerging. SteamOS was the closest we saw and even that Valve wasn't willing to invest that much into given its less profitable than the fully proprietary contemporaries.