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Nuvendil on 18 May 2017
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S.T.A.G.E. said:
Nuvendil said:

I wouldn't say *everything* else is great.  Their wester third party relationships are strong, their Japanese third party relationships are barely present outside the handful of obvious ones.  Also, the 360 gained it's massive appeal because of  MS's efforts to diversify and shore up its exclusive offerings early on.  It began to decline after MS stopped doing that.  

And the smoke screen worked pretty well.  They kept promising PD and then just did so less frequently until everything quieted down and then released this so they can move on.  Most people won't even realize what happened until a while later.  Your forum goers will but that's a small group.  They did this as a measure to stop the bleeding though, the Xbox brand's perceived value has been in decline for a while due to MS's own tactics and mistakes, they couldn't afford to publicly cancel ANOTHER game after just canceling Scalebound.  It's not that PD is a big seller, it's the symbolic loss that's concerning.  

Well....in a generation where Sony is winning, have third party japanese companies ever really had a need to run to an outsider unless they were desperate? Microsofts smokescreen has worked ...but again only with people who are impressed by secondary things rather than primary things to a console. Its why fanboys have been gloating about the scorpio for five months straight with few great exclusives to show for their fanfare.

Well your fanboys don't need blinding.  It worked on the average consumer who just knows "hey, there's that Phantom Dust thing".  It keeps that game in their mental image of the Xbone even though it actually doesn't exist.  And small exclusives like these are again symbolic.  Sony learned this with the PS1 and PS2:  you aren't selling people the box or the individual games, you are selling them the platform, the ecosystem you are creating.  The PS2 had some awful 3rd party ports and was noticeably weaker but people bought into the Playstation platform because Sony built and promised a compelling ecosystem on Playstation.  MS knows this is important and that canceling games, closing studios, leaning too hard on 3rd parties, constantly having fire sales, all those create a mental assumption in the audience that your ecosystem isn't very vibrant or very desirable.  

And no, Japanese third parties don't have to run to MS.  But MS could have at least tried to build bridges.  They did with the 360 and it DID help.  But this time they just didn't.  At all.