DonFerrari said:
Machiavellian said:
Which is the point MS is making, yes they have done it in the past but they do not do it anymore. Sony being the dominate market share company doing deals that lock out games to competitors hits along antitrust laws. The problem for Sony is that once you become the dominate player in a market, the things you use to do are seen with a different light. If there are agreements and contracts to lock out games from MS or any competitor, then they would be using their market advantage to strike these deals and be hit with antitrust laws. For MS, being on the bottom and having Sony regulated or even the industry regulated on those types of contracts is more in their favor then Sony. The thing is buying a publisher or buying out a lot of devs studios, it really doesn't matter. If this deal is stopped then MS may be setting up a case to stop anyone from purchasing any companies in this space. As to your point of adding your games to your service day one, I totally disagree with this point. The point of adding all your games to your service day one is because MS is a service company. Meaning that they are not trying to be bound to the console space and the limitations of selling hardware. MS wants to sell subscriptions and their aim is to put games on all platforms. MS probably never going to catch up to Sony and Nintendo on the hardware front so why fight them where they are strongest. Instead MS is trying to fight their competition where they are strongest. On the business aspect, it takes a long time to build new studios, getting the right people and getting a game to market. While it sounds wonderful in gamers head, to a business, the risk are way higher than just getting already established and successful studios. |
MS still in fact pay to devs to have exclusives, be them permanent or temporary. |
My thoughts exactly. They don't do it anymore? They have been doing it for this whole gen, they never stopped. The only thing that differs is the length of time as MS typically goes for 6 months exclusivity rather than a 1 year or in Forspoken's case, 2 years. Some people might try to rationalize it by saying "Oh but it doesn't count because it's more of an indie game" but that's just Twitter type of posters. There are plenty of games in the last number of years that MS did exclusive deals for.
Hell they bought Bethesda and immediately scrapped Starfield which was initially coming to PS. They were so petty they bought a 3 month timed next gen patch for Yakuza and a 48 hour stipulation that Atlus couldn't announce Persona 3/4/5 on PS and wouldn't even allow preorders for those games on PSN.
MS complains that Sony pays for marketing deals in which they block gamepass access for a year but then goes over Sony and negotiates a gamepass deal for MLB the show which just shows how hypocritical they are. They will shake your hand with one hand but keep a rock in the other.
Both of these companies have bought exclusives in some way and both continue to do it. So to say that MS no longer does it is absolutely false!
