This is the most asinine approach IMO.
“Let’s release a worse product. Hey, no one likes it. Okay, let’s spend money on games so THEY can essentially force people to use our software. Hey, still, no one really likes it. Okay, let’s try to give away stuff for free. Hey, people use our thing for the free stuff but still no one likes it for any other reason.”
They just keep spending money to up their numbers and their product is still missing features and inferior to competition. They spend big money on exclusivity, but that is only temporary - if that’s how you’re getting your customers, you’re going to have to keep doing it forever to retain them. If people only use you for free stuff, you’re just going to have to keep giving stuff away at a loss to retain them.
This model is not sustainable. You’re not doing anything that aligns value with your customers besides just throwing free stuff at them. That’s not a business.
What’s especially sad to me is they could literally have just spent that same money to improve their launcher and have an actual product. Instead they’ve invested in temporary stats. They’re essentially bankrolling other devs on games with temporary popularity instead of in their lifelong product.
Using other games exclusivity as sway into your ecosystem only works when you have a good product the person would be interested in but they haven’t seen it yet. EGS is currently something people are essentially coerced into using but no one really gets any real value out of it other than “well I couldn’t buy this game anywhere else”
The thing is, there are versions of all of these (Cast, any number of messaging clients) that have broader compatibility already. They just tend to be locked out of Apple’s ecosystem and Apple has its own versions that lock everyone else out of there’s.
These systems would be so much more friendly for the consumer if everyone just worked together but this insistence on keeping these things siloed just makes it worse for literally everyone.
Wanna share your video on the TV at my house? Oh you have an iPhone? Oh, Yeah your gallery can’t Cast. I want to share a video at yours? Oh, you have an Apple TV so I can’t Cast to it and Airplay doesn’t exist in my gallery or OS.
This only hurts consumers. And the only people it’s helping is the manufacturers selling you Google TV/AppleTV via suckers that buy both.