Sony relying on heavily bundled and/or deep discount just to get games into million sellers list?

[Dodece]

@theprof00

I am not going to take sides in your little spat, but your definitely coming out on the losing side. This fights seems to have become personal for you, but for them it seems to be more sporting then anything else. You need to retreat, regroup, and refocus. I don't know what happened in that other thread, but if you are bringing that baggage into this thread it is a bad sign indeed. At this rate your only going to hurt yourself. Either you are going to end up losing this argument badly, or you are going to end up getting yourself banned by crossing a line. To put it mildly you need to step back for a while, and think about what you are doing.

@topic

Why is it that in this thread we only discussed first party consequences of bundling, and entirely ignored the very real implications that bundling has on third parties. First party sales have to be at the expense of third party sales, Sony is playing a shell game up front. That third party developers don't get any say in, or play in for that matter. Sony can roughly balance out wins and losses, but the more it is about first party software. The less room there is for third party studios to make money off of the platform. Eventually this aggressive bundling could end up really driving away developers from the platform.

Let me put it this way if Sony is offering up ten free games a year with a purchase of the console, and the console has a annual software attachment ratio of three games. Then there isn't a lot of room left over for third parties that have to sell their games to make a living. Sony is competing in a heavy handed way with third parties. Who have no real stake in the console having a couple million more in sales annually. All they know is that they are selling less games as part of the bargain.