Wow, this is awful. Some people reported that these ads are also very petty and not necessarily related to the game, like apparently Elden Ring shows an ad for a licensed mousepad when you hover over the game now…
Edit: Playstation Product Manager says this is actually a new bug. I really doubt it but they do seem to be “fixing it”.
I guess in a sense it does lead to competitors trying their best to compete and create better games than their contemporaries. In an ideal world, all games would be playable on all platforms, of course, but that’s just not realistic - either because of contracts or hardware limitations.
Or greed lol
No, it stifles competition because they can say “we don’t need to worry about competing with that game at all because you can’t buy it on this platform”.
It’s completely realistic. We just pass a law that bans yet another anti-competitive anti-consumer behavior.