Sounds like it’s time to call in Barack Obama.

If centrism and bipartisanship were what voters wanted then the Dems would have won the Flordia governorship. That race exemplifies exactly the strategy that got us to where we are today.

You can only boot from the C Drive these days because a modern BIOS AI has such a small model it can only read at a first grade level. The first commands it understands are C Drive “the discovery command”, C Drive Run “initial boot”, Run Drive Run “OS handover”.

The fact that they have made terrible business choices doesn’t mean it is impossible to make good one.

The subscription model is not for driving positive revenue it is to smooth out investor concerns. You have steady revenue streams to reassure that your market is stable so you don’t suffer as hard when you drop a Redfall.

The big issue is massive failure of handling day 1 releases. They made it TOO good of a deal. It probably is a corporate structure issue where the division owning game pass was able to sacrifice a neighboring divisions revenue so they could get good metrics.

Microsoft GamePass was serious competition and they ruined it, for now. They had managed to build a system where there was no reason for folks not to buy in, people got nearly unlimited games and then often paid for DLC and cash shop items for games they didn’t even own. It was converting the average gaming market to an a la cart style cash shop which as much as 2010 me would consider this offensive, today it is often better for gamers without money.

The only other thing that would seriously compete with Steam would be a marketplace that had tradeable games but I think the game makers don’t want this so no developer would sign up for it.

Itch.io exists and it does a fantastic niche gaming distribution job so I don’t see how a new competitor can do better than what is already out there.