Machiavellian said:
Who said it was Sony fault but if you believe Sony did not have a part in the direction of how the games industry do exclusives then you do not know gaming history. This was their MO when they came into the gaming space. Tactics today are directly the results of the past, nothing has really changed. All that has changed is that a few publisher came up for Sale, and MS took full advantage of it but developers studios left and right have been getting purchase and that will only accelerate as they all look at the bigger amount of money to be had. Gaming is outpacing everything and is a Trillion dollar industry with mobile. If you believe that things will remain the same, that would be wishful thinking. Its the wild wild west now and the companies with the biggest gun gets to go home. We already see Saudi throwing big bucks around. I believe Apple is right around the corner. Google will probably be making another effort and Amazon is trying to carve out their space. Who knows in 10 years you might be wishing for these days again before the dust settles. Come on Ark 2 and Valheim are big on PC but have no real presence on console. At least Deathloop and Ghostwire are from very successful developer studios in the console space and their new games carry way more weight then these 2 PC games. Even still, it really does not matter, I am talking about response from both companies. MS has the resource to take it up a notch and as a competitor why should they not. If you look to lock me out of games, I can go 100 times harder and take the whole company off the board. That is what we call a big flex move. Who knows next time, it could be Apple coming into the space and they can make even bigger flex move over MS. If you have read any of my post you know I have no problem with Sony response, I just believe that strategy wise they made some big mistakes. They went all in on the COD angle and it ended up being the worse play they could have made. I have said this from the beginning that as long as Sony made this deal about COD it was a losing strategy because MS was always willing to do whatever deal using COD. COD was the carrot and Sony chomp on it like a champ. |
Sony probably moneyhatted a ton of exclusives in the PS1 and PS2 eras which was a continuation to what Nintendo and others did in the previous generations, a standard industry practice that perhaps got worse due to PS1 and PS2's sheer dominance (and superior hardware design in PS1's case). But the vast majority of PS1/PS2 exclusives weren't "moneyhatted". The dominant platform gets a lot of free support without the platform holder necessarily paying anythng. And porting was a more complicated process back then.
Since the PS360 era, notable exclusive deals became less and less common until eventually even Japanese PC support grew to easily rival Playstation's. Knowledge is now accessible by everyone thanks to the internet, engines are easy to use and scalable, architectures don't vary much, and porting job is very simple.
ARK sold millions on Playstation and Valheim has the potential to sell millions as well. The titles themselves are big and growing, much bigger than Ghostwire and Deathloop. But if you're gonna play the "but it doesn't sell much on [insert platform]" card, then this makes Sony's moneyhatting more justifiable/less important. Even Monster Hunter World only cracked 2 million on Xbox next to 9-12 million on PC and PS4 each. So if you're basing an exclusivity deal's damage/relevance on how much it sells on a platform rather than the IP's own significance, that would put MS in a more negative light because ALL relevant games sell much better on Playstation than Xbox. ARK2 and Valheim >>> Ghostwire and Deathloop no matter how you slice it. A better argument can be made for Microsoft is that the exclusivity period is typically shorter.
I didn't mean to say you were blaming acquisitions on Sony, but a lot of people did and still do. Shikamaru, the OP, often blamed Micosoft's acquisitions on Sony's moneyhatting. The uncomplicated truth is Microsoft's acquisitions are not related to Sony's exclusivity deals which hardly have an impact on Xbox, but congress toddlers are throwing a tantrum about it. Imagine having the gall to criticize Sony's meager deals in light of MS acquiring Mojang/Zenimax/ABK. What I see is Microsoft being rewarded for incompetence, and Sony penalized for competence.
I'm not interested in talking "business".. anything goes in business, and Microsoft with its infinite resources is definitely kicking Sony's ass right now because once ABK is acquired, they will be a considerably bigger player in gaming than Sony and Nintendo, while still pretending to be as a small player in their adventure to acquire major publishers and studios. Hopefully they will fail next time. As I already mentioned, ABK makes similar profits to the entire Playstation division. Why does no one talk about this? Why is gaming now reduced to just "hardware marketshare" following the countless times Microsoft downplayed this metric?
EpicRandy said:
When I see too much blatant bullshit, hypocrisy, and false equivalences, sometimes I feel like pointing them out. you realize the rest of your paragraph is filled with these? Claiming Ark 2 and Valheim order of magnitude bigger is bullshit and false equivalence they are both only 20$ non AAA game on steam (or follow up to a 20$ game for Ark 2) and are both targeting GamePass day 1. Ark 2 will also only be exclusive for the alpha release only and Valheim is only expanding on console. Both game from Bethesda were full AAA from a renowned publisher with no prior presence on other ecosystem. Claiming Bethesda is a less relevant developers is also bullshit. As far as I know Ark2 and Valheim are the only 2 recent MS deals exclusivity we know of or suspect of while Deathloop and Ghostwire Tokyo are only 2 out of many others for Sony which also make this comparison a false equivalency. exclusivity deals and just won't act the same way when Microsoft does it 10-100 times worse Exclusivity deals just don't act the same when your already the market leader by a huge margin, exclusivity deals are also way more impactful per $ spent than acquisition. From the PS360 generation onward, most platforms exclusivity deals were "fucked up" within reason. You can no longer say this with where this industry is heading. I don't even know why you mean by "fucked up" within reason but there's no difference in the way exclusivity deals are made now then back during the 7th gen or 6th gen or even the 5th gen. The only thing that changed is MS had drastically increased the use of such for the 1st half of the 7th gen then dial them back after Kinect release, dial them back again after Tomb Raider and now seems to not target any AAA while Sony as remained pretty constant since the 5th gen on their use of such. And no... it's not "Sony's fault". If someone's not happy about where things are going... blame Microsoft and Microsoft alone. You realize Machiavellian is not blaming Sony for anything right? by the same token of your argument if someone happy with where things are going should they thank MS and MS Alone? There's no blame or thanks necessary MS is playing by the very same rule Sony have been playing since they joined the market with the Ps1. Sony never stopped to look at the consequence on the competition and neither should MS. The standard/fair/typical response to Sony from an "ethical standpoint" is to make similar deals. I'm guessing by that you mean MS should not target big publisher because Sony never could do as much? I've seen this argument many time in one form or another and it's simply wrong, it conveniently place Sony in a spot where it decide what's ethnical or not. Sony isn't some kind of arbiter of ethics, MS actions are not and should not be limited by what Sony does, is willing to do or have the capacity to do. |
You know Ghostwire and Deathloop were made by smaller (less important) developers within the Bethesda group (not the TES/Fallout devs lol) and sold a fraction of Valheim and ARK2. And they don't chart anywhere even during sale (Ghostwire is currently at $34 AUD on the Playstation Store). Valheim and ARK 2 should be many times bigger and sell 20/30 million+ easy. They're more than 10 times bigger in some metrics, and less in other metrics. You seem offended for no reason whatsoever. I shouldn't have lumped in Ghostwire with Deathloop though, because the latter is notably bigger (but still many times smaller than the aforementioned).
Machiavellian didn't blame Sony and I never said he did. "Sony's fault" is a general argument that exists among Microsoft's fans who keep justifying the acquisitions using the Sony's moneyhatting excuse. Playstation's dominance from the PS4 onwards owes very little to paid exclusives, which virtually have no impact on Xbox.
It's not Sony's fault that Microsoft is incompetent. It's not Sony's fault that Microsoft decided to make Xbox redundant by shipping all of their games day and date on PC thereby losing console marketshare. It's not Sony's fault that they overestimated the Series S and can't produce enough Series X units. Microsoft's decisions and mismanagement are their fault and theirs alone. Going broader inherently hurts Xbox's sales potential, and yet Sony has to pay for it, it's laughable. Let me clarify again than I'm not saying YOU or Machiavellian are personally blaming Sony for it, but it's a rather common sentiment from acquisition cheerleaders.
"Exclusivity deals just don't act the same when your already the market leader by a huge margin"
Not sure I understand you here. Are you saying it's worse when a marketleader does deals even though they will impact far fewer players?
There are no ethics in business, but I would have liked to see some consistency from those whining about Sony's exclusivity deals. Microsoft's acquisition are disproportionate and potentially destructive... and they're also clearly not stopping them from moneyhatting pretty big games as like Valheim and ARK 2, which as you pointed out are more recent.
Exclusivity deals in the old days were a lot more substantial because old systems, especially Sony's, had very high quantities of relevant and system selling 3rd party exclusives. That is no longer the case with modern platforms where most gamers have access to the majority of relevant 3rd party games that sell systems (Compare PS1/PS2's best sellers to PS4's. PS4 is dominated by multiplats and 1st party titles. 3rd party exclusives are very few and don't rank high, meaning: "Moneyhatting is hardly relevant").
Microsoft's acquisitions may eventually lead to dozens of big titles skipping a major platform and a massive playerbase needlessly (Starfield is the beginning). Some of you keep assuming that Sony won't be able to respond, but you are wrong. They will respond to the best of their ability, and they will take more games from Xbox fans starting with Bungie's at some point (Their first "fucked up" acquisition. Sony will not doubt pull Bungie games out of Xbox once Microsoft pulls CoD out of Playstation. Yay!). A lot of fanboys are cheering for potentially hundreds of billions wasted just to have games locked on their preferred platform, most of which would have been there regardless, just not as exclusives. This unprecedented development would be Microsoft's fault. Sure, it's within their right as a company but why should I give a fuck? All I see is mountains of cash burnt only for games to sell less. It's a loss-loss.
I actively criticized Sony for their more obvious moneyhatting. But Micrososft is doing it several times worse (counting major acquisitions), and it isn't really a response to Sony's paid exclusives, but rather as a response to Playstation's well earned dominance. They are literally being rewarded for incompetence and I'm supposed to keep a straight face about it or risk offending people.
