Best thing the judge can do is grant pi, then have the ftc write up guidelines for the video games industry both cloud and console, regulate the fuck out of it.
1. pubs cant sign/negotiate no more than 4 third party exclusive deals per year with platform holders. So thats 4 per year for Sony, MS, nintendo.
2. 3rd party exclusives cant be permanent, they expire 1 year after game is launched on the initial platform, no extensions.
Call me crazy but i think its the best way to cool off a $2 trillion company and allow more games on all 3 consoles eventually, making your 1st party the only real differentiator, thereby cause them to double down on in house development.
No offense but this is a terrible idea. The government would love for nothing more than to regulate the gaming industry, to its benefit. That's the risk the industry faced in the early '90s, BTW. It would be magnitudes better if the industry self-regulated, similar to the decision between Sega & various 3P publishers to help form the ESRB.
Your first point isn't even much of a regulation; 4 games per publisher or 4 games for all publishers collectively? How would the latter be fair to publishers? What if a publisher
wants to do a deal with a given platform holder but can't because they're locked out due to an arbitrary limit? Wouldn't limiting platform holders to 4 3P exclusivity deals a year automatically hurt smaller 3P publishers like Annapurna or Devolver Digital? How would smaller publishers be able to realistically compete with the bigger publishers for getting 3P exclusivity deals with platform holders? What criteria would exist to determine how two competing 3P publishers can go about seeing who wins a contract deal? Can't platform holders arbitrarily make exclusivity deals costlier since they know the amount of slots are limited, so per-game deals end up costing a lot more?
The second point also has its problems. What if the 3P exclusive uses propriety tech belonging to the platform holder, which would require the game to be exclusive for longer than a year as the port to other platforms might not be able to use that tech and have to switch to other tech? What if the platform holder didn't just pay to "moneyhat" the game, but actively funded the game's development either partially or fully? Shouldn't they have a right to claim in a sense that the game is as much 1P as it is 3P, and have it remain an exclusive for longer? What if the game has licensing issues that necessitate changes to bring it to other platforms, who pays to get those licensing issues resolved?
That's why it's not just easy to blanket-regulate 3P exclusivity deals, or especially let the government hands-off regulate an entire industry for deals that have generally been perfectly fine, even if can at times favor the market leader. Nothing inherently stops gamers from purchasing multiple platforms to access all the exclusives out there, other than some financial situation on their end. But I don't buy the idea people are "inherently" owed access to every single thing on a single platform or ecosystem just because that's the only platform or ecosystem they
chose to invest into. Choices have consequences, positive and negative, and gaming is a privilege, not a right.