Phil Spencer: Xbox Series didn’t need a system seller at launch

[DonFerrari]

sales2099 said:

sales2099 said:

eva01beserk said:

sales2099 said:

Imo calling Bethesda a “poached” developer warranted my response. Like the acquisition was without honour or something. It was done with mutual agreement with a premium that is unheard of in this industry. But sure that dastardly MS “poached” poor and innocent Bethesda. 

So that’s where I’m coming from and I hope the mods see that too. 

As a 3rd party dev, Bethesda existed in the wild. Any gamer that wanted to play a Bethesda game could play it on their platform of choice, with the exception of Nintendo. But even then there are a few Bethesda games on Switch. Now, if MS goes through with Bethesda exclusivity they will have removed all those Bethesda games from the wild, making them PC/Xbox only. I'm sure Bethesda is more than happy to be purchased, but that's beside the point. If MS does indeed plan on buying up even more studios simply to spitefully keep them off PS5, then they are insanely hypocritical, and damaging to gaming as a whole. MS can do whatever they want with their own home grown content. If you made a game you have every right to sell it however you want. But trying to moneyhat 3rd party games off of PS5, simply because you want to monopolize the gaming industry is a scumbag move. Anyway, call it whatever you want. Poaching, Scalping, Extreme Moneyhatting. Either way it goes against their previous PR spin nonsense that "Exclusives are evil. Sony is evil for making better games than us, and then not selling those games on our platforms!!!"

Both Sony and MS bought studios. What each studio made before hand is irrelevant. To me going 1st party takes the dev off the market. They objectively aren’t expected to make multiplat games because we know it’s a simple matter of ownership. But a dev staying 3rd party doing exclusive content...that’s dirty. 

But there really is no moral high ground you can take as a Sony fan, especially talking about “damaging gaming”. Sony drove Sega out of console gaming. The beat Nintendo so bad that they will never return to traditional consoles ever again. All their consoles have to be underpowered and have a unique hardware quirk to remain competitive. Sony almost drove out Xbox until Phil convinced MS to back them. 

You talk about MS trying to monopolize the gaming industry and scumbag moves...look no further then Sony having a rich history of choking out competition. As long as PS has more marketshare, Xbox should be buying and buying and buying and buying until Sony doesn’t have anybody left to moneyhat and we can finally have some long overdue equilibrium. 

There is a lot of high ground to be taken comparing buying small studios at a rhythm of like 1 or 2 per gen that only made exclusives and building those up over time and showing the results versus buying over 15 studios over a 1-2 year spam with some of them being big and making multiplatform with not really a good historic of what was done with those they purchased. Don't be disingenuous.

EDIT: And on your monopoly claim. Just because Sony have far more threads dedicated to it in VGC than Xbox doesn't show it is a monopoly, and even you wanted to only focus on sales and take out switch to have only direct competition if you have 2 competitors and one sells the double that can't be decided a monopoly because well with 2 competitors some would certainly have something above 50% of the marketshare. Mindshare dominance isn't monopoly. And well if number of threads could be used to determine monopoly then the number of interviews that Phil Spencer do that generate more reports on the front page than all other gaming related news combined that is a monopoly of the discussion.

Last edited by DonFerrari - on 16 November 2020