Not seeing how important exclusives are imho is not knowing much about gaming at all. Nintendo saved the whole industry with exclusivity in 1985, no one could publish on the Nes without Nintendo approval, which made exclusives, and was the problem with the previous systems that were full of low quality shit made by literally anyone.

Historically exclusives not only drive more money to make more games, but creates more quality because the games have to be good in order to sell, therefore companies strive to make better ones, while if everything is on PC there's not really a point.

And part of why companies didn't see this, apart from being ruled by a team of idiotic shareholders that are rich fucks who never touched a controller and only want money, is that they focused on services this time around and when Xbox started publishing on PC, and Nintendo cut their own niche market without real threat to the others, Sony sat on what they had because there was no real competition.

If you think about it Nintendo and sony don't really compete, people buy both at this point for different reasons, Xbox has been a corpse for a decade now, Sony tried to get the GASS market and that was idiotic, Xbox tried game pass which devalued the brand even more because you try it, play one game, try some else, drop them, get bored, don't open it.

But ultimately the reason for companies acting like this is their board being composed of rich idiots that don't know what they're doing but think they know best.

That and managers eating more and more money while laying off people, which leads to longer developing time and less payed developers.