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As of today (2021-1-22), Microsoft have announced that in order to play online on their console, it will now cost you (in USD) $120 per year, which is frankly ridiculous. This comes after Sony has announced a possibility of game prices rising near $100. Prices can only go so high before the consumer loses interest, just look at what happened to Apple with the iPhone XS. Such an overwhelming majority of people decided to just buy their cheaper phone models instead, that the iPhone 11, which came after, was back to having a standard LCD and lower resolution display, leaving the fancy OLED to a more "enthusiast" pro model of the phone.
Unfortunately, this means that PC will likely make consoles fizzle out in the near future, as AMD's integrated graphics can run games perfectly fine with acceptable settings. PC usually has free online as well, since developers understand there are multiple storefronts, and it would be silly to charge people for online on multiple platforms. The issue I have with this happening though, is mainly the inevitable corporate greed that happens when something is no longer gate-kept. Yes, I support gatekeeping for a number of reasons, but here are some examples why.
PC gaming started really taking off around late 2014-early 2015, so when Microsoft released their new (at the time) OS, Windows 10, it had a mandatory "Telemetry" feature. Telemetry logs the user data, such as Websites visited, games played, email contents, etc. It is unknown what Microsoft does with this data. Some theorize it is sold, others theorize that Microsoft simply watches over as a "big brother". however, another example of popular things going wrong is with Ubuntu Linux, which I personally gate-keep the hell out of after seeing how wrong things can go.
Ubuntu had promise in its early life, which is why I switched to it from Windows, installing the 12.04 LTS almost a decade ago now. Because of its mission statement: "Linux for human beings", it attracted many people due to its ease of use and promise to make Linux easy to use. Well, it seemed to have attracted too many people, because its parent company, Canonical (which was founded just for working on Ubuntu), was having trouble keeping up with costs. At first it wasn't bad, Canonical simply had an Amazon affiliate link which they asked their fans to use for purchases, in order to help them raise money. People went ballistic over this (frankly not even bad) idea. Because of this, Canonical backed down and started plotting more ways to make money. This lead them to create a closed source, proprietary app store for their own apps called "snaps". On top of this, it was later discovered by the Linux Mint team that snaps were making secret connections to Canonical's servers, and now Linux Mint blocks all usage of snap apps by default for user safety. Indeed, the people complaining about a simple website link had opened Pandora's box on their own OS. If PC gaming were to kill consoles entirely, this is a future we might face with every game distribution service, not all are as trustworthy as Valve's steam, which lately has lost some of my trust as well.
A final note on why I dread the inevitable future of consoles dying out is that physical games will be dead, which both Sony and Microsoft seem to be pushing for. You will no longer own a copy of any game you buy, while also spending $120 to play online. Why even bother owning a console at that point? This will be especially painful to game collectors like myself, who seek to preserve the experiences for the future. I use my beefy PC purely for online gaming, since online is free, and owning an online only game is pointless. All we can do for now is hope that Microsoft backs down on this (frankly idiotic) decision.