Just to quickly point my view on this, but consoles are machines built specifically for gaming. They're easy. Exclusive games are built to take advantage of this. You never hear people complaining about exclusives on handhelds, because there's no competition in that regard, but with consoles many ppl get turned off when they hear about exclusives. Even if we just had PC, there would be exclusives. We would have multiple shops and encryptions and I can see many such things happening like that. Exclusivity is a business practice we all have to deal with. I'd rather use a console just because it's quicker than my PC, I don't need to worry about my PC specs, and there aren't a hundred different things I need to know the difference between to figure out if the game will run or not on my PC. It's ease of use that makes consoles great and exclusivity just helps sell them. I'd rather have consoles and exclusivity than some other arbitrary means of exclusivity on the computers themselves.Yeah, it is unnecessarily, infuriatingly restrictive.
One of the reasons I'm more of a "PC master" race type of gamer is because console exclusives and no meaningful cross-platform are terrible for games and terrible for gamers... and I view (maybe wrongly) PCs at least remaining some kind of neutral as far as that goes (give or take some controller limitations for MOBAs and RTS).
Imagine how much better SGs would be doing if we had one cohesive community instead of one spread across three consoles (including the poor bastards that only have it on the xbox :( ).
I really hope SF5 with its PS4/PC xPlatform heralds a changing paradigm.
listen man