While on consoles... It's much better.
More generally, locked down hardware means you have to trust a central third party. The cypherpunk in me doesn't like that. There has to be a better way (though I don't know what).
The better way is to buy a general computing device if that's what you prefer, and let others buy their locked down devices if that's what they prefer.
For me to chose an open device, that open device has to exist in the first place. Where is the open equivalent of the PS5? I don't see any. And even if it did: I bet many competitive game would exclusively found in the locked down version. Or, more insidiously, there would be two arena: the locked down one with fewer (or no?) cheaters, and the open one with (presumably) all the cheaters. There would be a strong incentive to get the locked down version for this reason alone, and one isn't going to waste money & resources on a redundant piece of electronics just so they can play without cheats and access the homebrew market.
Now that I think of it, there might be a way: how about optional signatures? You'd take the same hardware, and run it in two modes: the open mode, and the signed mode. The signed mode would be thoroughly locked down by the hardware vendor, and run only signed code. This could affect networking too: just sign the encryption keys with the secure chip, and pass that along with a certificate from Nintendo or whoever. That way one would know the communication was initiated in "signed mode", thus guaranteeing the integrity of the game's binary, just like we would in an actually locked down console.
Heck, we could go even a step further: have the hardware security module be swappable. That way we can separate the hardware vendor from the certificate authority. Of course, they'd be one and the same by default, but we could still switch for another if we need to. (You could have a tournament specific CA, or the hardware vendor could revoke it's own HSM and send a new one to people.)
DRM for the people. Never thought I'd say that.
