Dulfite said:
1) They absolutely can. All they have to do is make a contract, offer money, and have that studio sign it. How do you think they got the KOTOR console exclusivity? Or the FF7R console exclusivity? Whether timed or permanent, they can get exclusives by going to 3rd party mega companies (EA/Blizzard/Ubisoft) just as much as independent 3rd party companies. 2) I mentioned they failed before, and particularly in recent memory they have focused on dominating industries with their wallet. I'm not talking much about 1990's-2010 Microsoft, moreso about 2010-2021 Microsoft. Also, while Xbox has been third in sales, they have made tremendous profit off of Xbox Gold for many years and now are making a lot off of Gamepass. Who cares about hardware sales when profits are up based on smart software moves? I don't know anything about Groove or MS smartspeakers, which means MS obviously didn't even attempt to make a major splash otherwise those attempts would be well known by basically everyone. I keep up with all kinds of news and so if I haven't heard of those, I'm sure many other millions of consumers haven't either. IE failed after years of complacency, and what did MS do? They didn't give up. They came out with Edge, which is far and away a better product than IE and consumes a lot less RAM than Chrome. Their phone line was a major push that flopped, I didn't say they were perfect just that most of their major investments in recent years lead to domination. They absolutely failed (so far) on the phone front, including their surface phones which have sold horribly due to how expensive they are. 3) Before that ex-boss said what he said, I had no idea Sony was in a struggling situation. I was basing that part solely on what he said about games doubling cost from $100 million last gen to $200 million this gen and how that isn't sustainable for Sony. I assumed that a former boss of Sony would know what he is talking about, but if what you said about their cash reserves is correct then I don't know what he is complaining about? 4) I could spin that part on you bringing up Sony. If they have such a big cash reserve, why did they allow MS to buy Bethesda and all the other studios? Money does buy you a degree of marketshare from studios that want to make the most money off selling, but nothing can buy out stubborn individuals that own companies that don't want to sell or don't want to sell to a specific company. I'm sure there are companies that would't want to sell to Saudi Arabia, or EA, or Tencent for moral reasons, and then there are companies that wouldn't care because their owners want to make the most money. Then you have countries that have laws preventing international takeovers; I have heard Japan has some laws preventing that sort of thing. I think Microsoft would rather own a studio than make exclusive deals with them. That whole Platinum dragon game probably made them hesitant to make those sorts of deals with companies they have virtually no control over. Not saying they won't or don't have those deals in place, I just doubt they will happen very often on a AAA level, whereas Sony is very willing to do that. That leaves Sony able to make those deals by adding a bunch of cash to prevent a multiplatform release (or at least a timed deal). If MS bid on the same game to be exclusive or not to their platform as Sony, there is absolutely no way Sony could win that bid battle. |
1) You do understand that its an agreement with two parties. Sony can't just chuck money at RAD that Facebook owns and say make a PSVR exclusive. Facebook can say never. A third party can simple say no, I want to cultivate fans on all platforms etc.
2) Gamepass is not profitable. MS has never published Xbox profits so who knows. Edge uses Chromium, its a direct admittance by MS that they can't compete with Chrome and so had to fork Chrome, rather than use their own browser engine. Point is, MS might have money but they often don't have the creative/engineering talent and vision to make popular products. Nearly all their new arms have been by buying out already successful companies.
3) Sony sells 60M games a year. They make 1B+ in profits from their first party games alone. Playstation can afford to make games that have budgets of 100-200M because their games sell a lot. UC 20M, TLOU 20M, Spiderman 20M, GoW 15M, Horizon 15M, Ghost will probably sell 10M+.
4) Because for Sony Bethesda is massively overpriced at 7.5B. They bought Insomniac for 200M and they're going to have 2 20M+ selling games, and 2 10M+ games. MS overpayed for Bethesda because they desperately needed bigger IPs to compete with Sony. The reason MS can't get AAA big third party exclusives is because Playstation owns like 70% of console software sales. No company is going to easily cut 70% of their console userbase for money. Its also why Sony can get Japanese exclusives so easily, JP pubs are only missing 10-15% of sales. Sony absolutely could win a bid because MS might not value the get as much as Sony. Its also about how much value the acquisition brings.
