DirtyP2002 said:
And here again, just like with God of War, Sony does the same as MS. Investing in it, release sequels for it (4 games in 5 years). And this is not a bad thing at all, if consumers want it and buy it. Every company would LOVE to have these franchises like Halo, Gears, Fable, Forza. But when MS keeps investing in it, it is bad. Sony tries to create franchises as succhessful as these and did not really get there yet, so new IPs will be killed shortly after (MAG, Resistance, Starhawk, Twisted Metal etc). The two franchises that got there God of War and Uncharted are handled by Sony the same way MS handles their games. This is the only point I tried to make. |
Yes, I get your point, but I have doubts on Forza, though. With Halo, Gears and Fable you can invest more on different titles of the franchise during a single generation, because you release different "volumes" of a saga, but a major racing sim is different, you aren't telling a story, with GT Sony released during this generation a prologue and then the main title, that it patches, updates and expands, and it's the leader of its category, so MS making with updates and expansions a new version to be sold separately and full price could end up being perceived as far worse value for money, even if the latest version is very high quality, and actually GT this gen sold more with a prologue and a main title than Forza with three main titles. And in both cases you can see the second title is the best seller by a big margin, while the third, and currently last, present only in Forza, is the worst one by far, it could be that for their genre, the third title in a single generation is what marks the beginning of "milking".
About everything else, I'd say Sony and MS aren't very different, but they are different enough to be able to thrive simultaneously. And without any doubt, MS marketing is far better than Sony one, they tend to be both often appalling, but MS keeps its own more effective, with another main difference, MS is far better at marketing games and Kinect than Sony is at doing it for games and PS Move, but Sony is better at marketing the PlayStation brand in general. And sales reflect this, as PS3 is closing the gap in HW, but XB360 enjoys the best attach rate of the industry by far this gen, and the trend is of further improving it, showing that its life cycle is still quite healthy (PS3 is currently healthy too, but XB360 attach rate is still unreachable, and it will stay so unless Sony keeps on selling PS3 for at least a couple of years after XB360 stops).
