Winning parties and losing parties are an inevitable result of competition. There is no way to separate that concept from the definition. A business has a totally different interest than a consumer. Consumers benefit from competition, but businesses compete to benefit themselves in the form of monetary gain.
Heheheh... I love it when the Sony fanboys come in to the MS threads and start to play. It's so fun. Especially when they aren't just trolls, but they really put a lot of thought and effort into it because they are actively trying to change people's opinions. Brad does it the best on this forum, I love it.
To his point: Yes, 100% consumers gain from competition, businesses hate competition and they'd rather have a monopoly. Umm... So what? Why are you trying to do a deep dive into economics in what is a very simple situation? We know you love Sony and now you are somehow trying to make the argument that console gaming would be better off without MS being in the game.
Sure, that's better for Sony. It's better for that business. But is it better for the consumer? No, and you've admitted as much. So why are you going down this road?
Implicitly, every time someone says "I hope the Xbox One starts selling better because we need competition!" No one should be opposed to breakaway successes. It usually means lots of very satisfied users and a company well rewarded for creating something lots of people thought was a good value.
Yet, you didn't feel that way a few years ago when Nintendo was a breakaway success with the Wii, did you? And that was truly a breakaway success. The PS4 outselling the Xb0x isn't a breakaway success. The Xb0x is still selling enough to it's established base that it is still in the game. Even if the PS4 outsells the Xb0x 4:1 as long as that :1 is of a large enough magnitude to make 3rd party games profitable then it doesn't matter. And with the systems so close in architecture as they are, there's no reason a developer who makes a PS4 game won't make that same game for the Xb0x - albeit with lower resolution or whatever because the Xb0x is a crippled piece of crap.
Again, in terms of this discussion - which was a 3rd party developer saying that it's better to have competition - of course! They want to sell their games to as many end users as possible and the market is better for them with more competition. If there's only the PS4 to sell their games to, they might have to conform to whatever crazy restrictions and requirements that Sony puts on them. But if there's a PS4 and an Xb0x, they can release one game across both consoles and if Sony wants to put extra restrictions on them, they can just ignore them and say "screw you, this is our game. play it or don't". And if Sony blocks their game, then it becomes and Xb0x exclusive.
