>That's really just tribalism.

I want to gently push back on this, as I've seen the simple explanation you say itself become a black and white accepted truth meme when reality is more complicated. Yes, tribalism does play a role, but the harder truth is there is legitimate, logical self interest and game theory at play too. Game consoles, or computer OSes, are platforms with a significant network effect economic component. People do not generally buy these just for the thing itself, they buy it because of the software it enables them to run (be it games or something else). The more software it has, the more value it offers for the price. And the more it sells, the more economies of scale allows further pushing down the cost, improving the offering, or both. But the existence of any given piece of software depends on there being a critical mass of buyers. If you're the only one to buy into a given platform, it's not going to be supported long and the value of your purchase will be low, and whatever potential you hoped for will not happen. If 10-20% of the market buys in, then it'll likely go along ok, but a lot of what it gets will be ports or down to luck. If it has 30-50%, it's guaranteed to have solid support, as much as anything else. If it has 80%, it's going to have everything, mainstream stuff will be optimized to the max for it, ultra niche stuff only a few percent of the user base is interested in will still be big enough in absolute numbers to get developed. All of this applies to peripheral hardware as well. None of this even touches "networking" as-in multiple people collaborating, which is a whole further thing of course.

So it's directly in someone's individual short term interest if as many other people buy into their preferred platform as possible. To go back to GGP's example, anyone who liked the Playstation 2 simply got more bang for their buck over the Xbox or GameCube. There were far more games for it, far more peripherals, developers went the extra mile for it's weird baroque architecture and pushed it to the limit. Xbox and GC both got some really cool games as well, but they were never explored to the same extent.

Though platform markets also reveal another aspect related to "short term" above: while within a short period or generation it's good for an individual buyer if their platform dominates, over a medium to longer term it's inevitable that a dominant player will get lazy/greedy and start to abuse what they've got to the detriment of their customers. Further it's not necessarily easy for competition to spring back up. So there's another tension there between short term and medium/long term interests.

Still though, I think "tribalism" has come to get thrown around too much, or perhaps alternatively people forget that "tribes" can work, and remain important. Most big things in the world require groups, not individuals. That necessarily means that how other people think and act directly affects others as well. No human is an island. If you think one option is truly the best one for you, that itself isn't necessarily good enough if you can't get enough others to agree. But nobody agrees 100% of the time. So long term banding together, smoothing over some disagreements with some agreement and placing some value on the group collective power itself is a strategy that is proven to get things done and deliver for people. "Just tribalism" is too shallow by far.