Game mechanics can be patented. It’s stupid, but things such as “loading screen mini games” and “overhead arrows pointing to your objective” have been patented. The second I believe even got enforced once.
I think these kind of things have been getting approved less and less, but I wouldn’t be surprised if “balls that contain monsters” was patented back in the early days too.
I can get the transfers between friends part, but why between platforms? That makes zero sense from a business standpoint.
The only way that would work is to have game companies manufacture and distribute an external storage medium themselves, because platforms sure as hell won’t say “Oh you bought a license on another store? Sure, you can use our CDN for free!”. And now we’ve almost reinvented game CDs.
We may joke about valve not making games, but they do have a large amount of people working on various titles.
They also do a lot of R&D for hardware, like the Steam Deck and VR headsets.
Side note: Valve isn’t doing the thing Unity tried to do. Unity tried to charge you every time someone installs the game. And you’re not even hosting the game’s data on Unity’s servers.
Steam takes money when you purchase, then will let you download it for free, anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Completely different.
Back on topic: It would be really interesting to see the actual server and bandwidth costs for hosting and distributing all those games. There’s no way it’s super low, or any of the competition surely would have caught up by now.
Of all the reasons to hate these messaging apps, it’s because messages last forever? I’d get it if you were concerned that private companies don’t really delete your messages, but you know the average person using these apps actually does want their messages to last?