I blame microsoft for showing sony how profitable it is.
Very little to do with it. Blame economics in general for going through the stuffter. Blame hackers for making increased, costly security measures mandatory. Blame server technology being fiddly and requiring hundreds of service technicians on staff at any one time. Blame stupid people for needing tech support phone/email lines. Blame developers for needing to use these online services with their own unique data cases.
I guess that World of Warcraft thing would be just as successful today from a technological standpoint if they only required a one-off payment, huh?
Most of the time theres no backwards compatibility.
And PC isn't the same? Old games on the PC were made quick, under the assumption nothing would change. Sure, there's communities dedicated to trying to get old games running right, but it's not a guarantee for every single case. About 75% of my games won't run on anything above Windows XP.
Hell, even modern games can be fiddly to get running. With such a fractured state of the market and no regulation or standardisation, there's no way to guarantee that one thing will work perfectly on every system configuration. This is why there's so many bloody "X Doesn't Work!" threads on Steam for games that other people claim are "100% Optimised".
On console, everything is built to spec and there's major penalties via the manufacturer for developers who produce games that break.
Also PC is an open platform where you can play thousands of indie games and older games, as well as total game conversion mods.
I don't like indie games in 9/10 cases, there's never any good total conversions for the games I own and I already explained the compatibility issues with old games. These benefits are extremely subjective.
It's weird too; there's a LOT of indie games for Xbox, Playstation and the Switch. I don't see how you can have that as an argument. Especially when console indie games tend to be higher quality as they have to go through the certification process, whereas PC games have no such thing and so the developers are free to richard all over the PC consumers.