Microsoft: the great negotiators?

[sieanr]

ookaze said:
I completely disagree.
MS is not a great negotiator, at all. Unless you think paying insane amount of money is being a good negotiator.
MS true strength is the fact that they can spend a lot of money to buy their way into some market. There is no negotiating in that.
I don't call paying $50 M to get exclusive GTA4 content, being good negotiator.
I don't call having to pay all the development for japanese games, being a good negotiator.
And I don't see a good negotiator home console maker losing $7 B dollars to this day on a console brand.

On the other hand, I always was amazed by how good negotiators 3rd parties (or even 1st parties) could be and scam MS into paying huge amount of money, far above the value of what they get in the end. That goes for Nintendo and Rare, Take Two and GTA4, Mistwalker and their JRPG, Namco for Trusty Bell, ...

Talking about goodies, I'm still always amazed by how blinded the MS followers are. That's something they are very good at too, blinding their followers. I'm thinking specifically of the Blue Dragon anime series. When it was announced and the first episode went to the XBL, I saw the first part of it, and thought : this is basically a crap anime, no one could ever call that enticing... to then hear the XBox followers call this anime very good... No need to say it had the life of a crappy anime series that it is. I don't know about the Viva Pinata cartoon, as I don't like cartoon, and couldn't give a good advice on it.
But that's just to say they throw money at anything, hoping for it to work. Sometimes it does, and that's their "strength".

Oh please, you can say that about all the console makers. cough/killzone/cough/wiifit/cough 

The fact of the matter is Microsoft is now using many of the same tactics Sony used to use. The difference now is that Sony can hardly afford those tactics, whereas MS has more than enough cash to sustain this strategy. Although I would say part of the reason Sony is approaching this gen differently is how they turned far less profit than you would have expected given their market share during the previous gens.

Basically Sony wizened up and decided that focusing on inhouse development could turn them bigger profits than an all out rush for market share, ala Nintendo. Then again, it doesn't look like this is working for them as much as you would think for reasons I wont go into here. Also the PS1 and PS2 strategy did wonders for Sony from a PR perspective and created a dedicated fanbase - something that MS is keen on imitating.

Edit; Hockeyman is my new favorite poster