Nah, let them make money off of the data of people that leave it on default settings. Sell 'em Gamepass too.

Problem with that is, if the xbox is a PC with sideloading capabilities (instead of being a much harder thing to engineer: a true “console experience” that just adds Steam), then all Sony’s current games can be pirated on the thing. Future titles would have whatever lock and also probably Denuvo, for sure, or Sony could just stop putting their games on PC. Sony probably wasn’t seeing a future where anyone but “sweaty PC nerds” would be playing Steam games in their living room with controllers, and Microsoft has the perfect opportunity to say “alright, whatever. We lost the exclusives arms race to Nintendo and Sony so let’s just do what we do best and maintain the biggest gaming platform in the history of the medium but make it as easy for Joe Rando to use as an Xbox 360 was”.

Microsoft has such an opportunity to learn the right lessons from the Steam Deck - make good convenient hardware with a lot of compatibility, slap a user-friendly interface on it, and do nothing to stop tinkering and customizing other than making it easy to restore back to stock.

The comparison to GeForce Now is wild, because that’s a service running “your” games on someone else’s hardware. Of course Sony can walk up to NVIDIA and say “fuck off, we don’t authorize you to run God of War for your users” and NVIDIA will say ok we won’t run God of War anymore.

Steam distributes game installers. Sony can’t make Valve produce a special version of Steam for the Xbox that tells its store that it’s on an Xbox, especially if the Xbox in question is literally a windows PC with a UI skin and a lock on administrator access. I can run Steam right now on my android phone via winlator and download+install a Steam game.

What Sony could do is patch restrictive DRM software into all their games that checks the hardware info and fails to boot if you’re on “an xbox”.

Or if MS let their xbox (which is just a PC with a custom UI) dual boot Linux or desktop Windows. Beat that.

It’s more that there’s not really any other use case for dual GPUs (without SLI/Crossfire) other than using those GPUs for stuff other than graphics processing. That means AI or crypto-mining in a VAST number of cases, with very very tiny subsets of users doing stuff like passthrough GPUs to a VM.

If the next Xbox home console is running full-ass Windows instead of a walled DRM garden, and then they partner with Steam for easy swapping between the “Xbox/Gamepass” UI and Steam Big Picture, that’s the best console. As in, like best console ever.

Anti-cheat is always malware (or at best it’s DRM), that sometimes reduces cheating in games.

On iOS your option is Safari and that’s what you’ve been using, even if the icon says Firefox or Chrome or Brave. It’s against Apple store TOS to have a web browser with an engine in it - they all have to be skins for Safari (Webkit). Different “iOS Browsers” will offer features on top of the Safari that actually does the browsing though, like account sync or built-in ad filtering.

The only platforms out there that are more hostile to open source software than iOS are like, game consoles.