>>15357850
>Nintendo remember what caused the first crash back when they saved the industry and don't want a repeat.
I'm sure this is bait, but I'll bite, because I know there are retards out there that dumb and loyal to Nintendo.
Lengthy certification processes and charging for patches has been SOP for consoles for longer than Nintendo consoles have been online in any meaningful sense. Nobody gives a shit about the quality of the game from a consumer perspective. The reason why they need certification is because they want to make sure the patches don't contain bugs that could potentially open up vulnerabilities in the hardware/software that could lead to piracy or malicious exploitation. They also charged for this process, as well as the distribution of said patches. Since Microsoft/Sony actually handle distribution themselves (unlike multiplayer, which the publishers have to host the servers for), they otherwise wouldn't get compensated for the network traffic the way they would if you were buying a digital game once those became a thing.
Such certification is not needed on the PC side, because firstly there is no central controlling authority that can deny or allow software publication. It's an open platform. Secondly, exploiting PCs through game bugs is a colossal waste of time akin to trying to find the perfect "hole" on a sponge from which to saturate it with water.
Certification, by and large, is also going to be going away in large part as time goes on and the push for cross-play continues to grow in popularity. Crossplay, by the way, isn't a move that's being made in an attempt to please the customers. It's an artifact of the free-to-play market starting to get saturated and more and more games, like BattleBorn, failing because their entire model relies on getting the most players into the game by lowering the barrier of entry - and then retaining them long enough to drop hundreds of dollars on it. What ends up happening is that once people drop hundreds of dollars on a title, they end up becoming invested in it to the exclusion of others and become hesitant to move on to other free-to-play and MTX laden games. To combat this, publishers want to consolidate their player-bases as much as possible to give their game the absolute largest possible playerbase for the longest amount of time in hopes that it will catch fire or at least develop it's own steady community of whales to milk. Fragmentation of the network is anathema to this, because while a game with a concurrent userbase of 3,000 players can hold on for a while with a niche audience… nobody is going to be encouraged to stick around if only 700 players or less are present on any given platform.
Now, cross platform play should absolutely be a thing - and it's a damned shame that such a promising start to the online infrastructure of consoles was effectively killed by Microsoft and Xbox Live - then buried by Sony and now had it's grave pissed on by Nintendo. But the tenuous steps into crossplay we're seeing now - while good in principal, are not being taken with the customer's best interest in mind. They don't give a fuck what you want, or what's best for the industry. They only care about what is the optimal configuration for extracting money from your wallet. Sometimes those interests align. Generally, they don't. This is one of those times they do.