What’s with all the gaming cat fights latelty ammirite? The latest hair pulling and name calling comes from Sony Computer Entertainment America’s Rob Dyer, senior VP of publisher relations, who’s taking a shot at rival Microsoft and its policies that require an Xbox Live Arcade game to be released on the platform first, before being sold anywhere else — like the PlayStation Network. Specifically, he’s targeting Microsoft’s European VP of interactive entertainment Chris Lewis who recently defended the company’s policy.
“I think what Chris and the other representatives at Microsoft are doing is protecting an inferior technology,” Dyer told IndustryGamers. “I think they want to dumb it down and keep it as pedestrian as possible so that if you want to do anything for Blu-ray, or you have extra content above 9GB, or you want to do anything of that nature, you’d better sure as heck remember that Microsoft can’t handle that.”
Dyer went on to say that Microsoft’s policies are hurting not only their relationship with the developers, but the consumer as well. “So potentially any time we’ve gone out and negotiated exclusive content of things that we’ve announced at things like DPS or E3, publishers are getting the living crap kicked out of them by Microsoft because they are doing something for the consumer that is better on our platform than it might be perceived on theirs. So from a creativity standpoint and what we are doing to try to make it better for the consumer, our view is Microsoft’s doing everything they can to eliminate that because they have an inferior technology.”
And MS being inferior (in almost every regard when it comes to software and hardware) is news because??????
Duhhh. They just figured that ou?. They should not talk to loud themselves after dumpling linux from the ps3
While I think what Microsoft is doing is bad from the point-of-view of a gamer who likes the latest cutting-edge in technology, I do have to partially disagree with this article.
Yes, Microsoft has “inferior technology” in terms of disc storage medium. But, I can see where they are coming from. If they were to upgrade or release an add-on with a larger storage capacity, they would be leaving some of their audience in the dark. Especially if the larger capacity was required for most games, or to just “keep up”. Granted, the Kinect did this to an extent, but the games for it appeal to a particular niche gamer crowd: kids, soccer moms, people who want to get in shape, and people who like “Wii-like” games.
But, when it comes to being organized, at least from the standpoint of an online gaming perspective, Microsoft wins hands-down. I can just log in, load my game, and just play. I’m not forced to install the game. I’m not forced to find friends through a pile of forums. I’m not forced to put in friend codes or set up a separate account for each and every game I play. Microsoft certainly doesn’t have the inferior technology in this particular category.
As for them forcing developers, both of Arcade titles and disc-based titles, to either put the game out on their console first or put exclusive content on their console, or face the consequence of not being published for the 360; that seems unfair and anti-competitive. It seems more like a business practice to hog all the good content, and not so much of a “tooling down” because of inferior tech. If you truly want to see a “tooling down”, just look at every port of a game put out on the Wii. If Nintendo were doing what Sony is accusing Microsoft of, then I could see it being truly a measure to protect inferior technology. Let’s not kid ourselves, the Wii truly is inferior technology to the 360 and PS3, and Nintendo has happily admitted that before, (Well, not in those exact words. More like “It’s not about graphics, it’s about games”, or “We are not directly competing with Microsoft and Sony” or “We make a different type of gaming experience”).
Personally, I think Microsoft and Sony should team up, and make a console together. Let Sony handle the hardware, and let Microsoft handle the system software and the online lobby. The two of them would bring so much to the table with their collections of developers. The outcome would be “fight or flight” for Nintendo. They would either have to develop an actual console with some real horsepower, or team up with someone big, (Apple, perhaps?), to keep their current way of doing things going.
None of the big three console makers have everything that everyone wants. It just doesn’t happen that way. In my personal opinion though, I think Microsoft is the one that listens to its customers the most.
Nintendo seems to look at what people expect, and then do the exact opposite. They keep making peripherals that nobody is asking for. Nintendo also seem to be focused on catering to the social gaming and child gaming crowd than anything else these days.
Sony seems to be on that bleeding edge of tech when it comes to graphics, but they seem to alienate their U.S. customers more often than not. They keep pushing out JRPGs and “pod-racing” games. The cross media bar is a mess. The constant stream of mandatory updates is annoying. The taking away of things certainly does not make Sony’s console look like “it can do everything”.
Microsoft has its faults too in this category. They make stupid apps for their console. Nobody really cares about Twitter and Facebook on the 360, especially when those apps can’t be accessed in-game. Their ESPN app looks cool, but if you’re a Time Warner customer, you can’t even use it. The best apps they’ve done are their online media apps, and bringing in the Kinect-enabled controls for them.
Gaming achievement points are another thing that is arguably either the best thing or the worst thing about the 360: The best thing because it encourages competitiveness and replayability for games. The worst thing because it detracts from actually playing the game, and forces it’s users to not like other non-360 games because of the lack of achievements. Sony’s trophies are nice, but for some reason, are just not as appealing as achievement points
.
The next gaming cycle is probably going to be locked down even more. We are advancing toward a completely digital format. It may not happen in the very next cycle, but it will happen. (My guess is 2017 or 2018 at the latest). The whole “who has a bigger disc” argument will no longer matter. The new argument will be “who can sell a better product, especially when Joe Consumer can no longer resell his non-physical copy of that game?”