Yeah, but if there is "no check big enough to have an exclusive game."

That would suggest there is no reason to have an exclusive game in the first place.

Which means microsoft shouldn't have had to pay for a multi-plat.

If anything it suggest Sony tried to pay off SE and they refused... which really doesn't bode well for Versus 13 exclusivity either.

It's funny that they use a big word, like invective, in a run on sentence. Not to mention that the comment wasn't an invective. (That's a matter of opinion, but invective is used for scathing, violent phrasing.)

I hate when people try to sound smart. Like I'm doing now. It's okay, when I do it.

Hey! On topic:

Tretton is a very good business man but there's always a check big enough. It's more on the first party end, they won't be willing to write that check anymore.

@Soriku: Last time I checked, Wii did pretty well for the first 20 months. 

Marketing, advertising, design, hype, and promises sell consoles.

Soriku said: DMeisterJ said: Yeah, they were, as were the gaming industry at large, and probably MS too MS should focus on internal development though. Especially as the PS3 userbase rises closer and closer, multi-plats may wind up doing better on the sony console *cough* DMC4 *cough* and not make it worth Microsoft's while. We've all conceded that FFXIII PS3 > FFXIII 360 in sales, so I'm not too sure what it helped MS to do that for.   This makes no sense. Even if they sell better on Sony consoles, sales will be mellowed out. FF XIII was exclusive to the PS3 and was THE reason to own a PS3. Some 360/Wii owners could've bought a PS3 for FF XIII. Now that it's on both the 360 and PS3, those 360/Wii owners could stick with their console or buy a 360 instead of a PS3 for it. Either way, it hurts the PS3 no matter what way you look at it. But at least the guy's being honest. Looks like they're intent on proving to third parties that the sales alone would warrant exclusives (though it's not going all that great). Also, of course Sony knew. They're share holders and if they didn't know this then Sony could EASILY sue SE. He's saying that MS likely paid for FF XIII...and since Sony is a share holder of SE that means MS likely paid for FF XIII just as I expected not because they want to expand (though that's probably a case as well, it's probably not the "prime" case). MS is really intent on hurting Sony this gen, but the Wii not so much.

SE is under no obligation to divulge all of their business decisions to all of their share holders. If they were then MS or Sony could easily buy a few shares in the other and demand to see all of their pending contracts. Never gonna happen.

Well thats how bussiness works. Money... Sony can help but see how MS play a similar game like them did it to Nintendo back on the 90's...

CD's did allow Square pull of the CG cutscenes which was probably a deciding factor. I'm sure no one thing swayed Square, but a combination.

Im the first to consider FFXIII going multiplateform is a big issue for sony

but GT5 > FFXIII

U have to put this in ur mind

Also, none of the 2 games was really shown at the E3 press conf

Sony is focusing on 1st party this generation and going forward I believe. It's much better for a long term investment as you don't have to keep repaying for exclusives. I believe Sony will probably purchase a couple of 2nd party developers within the next year or so.

The choice to use cartridges was an issue that did impact their support from third parties because there was a growing movement towards "Cinematic" games which (at the time) translated to "Games with FMV" ... Even CDs were pretty inadequate to the task given how many Playstation games were on multiple CDs that were filled with poorly compressed video. On top of this cartridges were very expensive which meant that developers had the choice of selling their games for more or taking smaller profits off of the sales of games.

There were benefits from cartridges though, and developers liked the quick data transfer rates which eliminated the need for loading times; and also created more seemless worlds. This also meant that they didn't need to store as much redundant data (for load time optimization) which meant that a similar N64 game didn't need as much storage space as a Playstation equlivalent.

In my opinion, you're right that there were bigger issues at play than the cartridges vs. CD ...

Leading upto the release of the N64 Nintendo openly talked about creating a platform with a smaller library that was only made up of the best games; in a lot of ways it was similar to how people suggest that they shouldn't allow shovelware developers to produce for the Wii today. There was talk of creating a more meaningful "Nintendo Seal of Quality" that would seperate good games from bad games, and most third party publishers were afraid that they wouldn't be able to get the seal and would (therefore) see poor sales as a result.

The N64 was a pain in the ass to develop for ...

1. There was too little memory and memory bottlenecks
2. The GPU had too small of a texture cache and microcode (primitive shaders) was difficult to write
3. the CPU only had a 32bit bus, no L2 cache and (IIRC) vector units which were confusing to developers
4. etc.

Had they done a couple of things differently (memory expansion by default, 16KB texture cache, 64bit bus, and 64KB L2 cache) a lot of the difficulties would have been easier to deal with. (Edit: They could have also increased the addressing space on the cartridges by a couple of bits which would have increased the theoritical size of cartridges which might have helped later in the generation)

The final problem was Nintendo's CEO ended up picking fights with executives of major Japaneese third party publishers, and their arogant attitude drove these publishers away.

Oh, it's SONY's fault that it went multiplatform? Sony INTENTIONALY lost exclusivity of the title? Hah, you make me laugh.

Let's think about this people. If Sony was surprised by this announcement, then how could they have known that Microsoft paid for it?