After reading the explanation, this seems like a nothing burger. Kinda like the RE8 parity clause that people were going nuts over.
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Epic lawsuit shows Sony asks publishers for compensation if MTX / playerbase ratio falls below certain amount compared to the cross-platform revenue
- Thread starter eonden
- Start date
What part don't you understand exactly?
By implementing this policy if a game happens to have a few whales on say switch over playstation the dev then has to give some of that money over to sony just because sony happens to have a bigger playerbase
The safety net in this really wouldn't be an issue for popular games. But for indie games or less known games I could see it being an issue.
Having to cover 15%(if it falls bellow 85%)just to use the PS pool may not be worth it in some cases. Because if the game isn't popular on PS, then you risk falling bellow 85%.
I fail to see how you would refuse to implement it based on this policy? What's the hypothetical in your mind?
"Guys this shit looks really bad but if you put yourselves in the shoes of a corporate CFO or an auditing firm partner for a second you know it actually makes sense. Also you probably haven't worked as hard me"
No, he fucking is. Keep fighting the good fight.
I'll take it. $50. I expect them to plummet to single digit prices now, so I'm offering you a steal.
User banned (1 week): hostility against other members and platform warring, previous infractions for same behavior
Wtf are you even talking about?
I swear, corporate stans crawling out of the woodwork ITT
Something something "standard business contract" but unless there are reports Nintendo and MS also have the same clause, I will assume Sony is the scummy greedy shit here, from a consumer perspective of course.
Since most of the time they do have the highest player base, a vast majority probally dont pay anything, and pretty much its a 15% cut on the MTX in the game. vs the 30% on platform, which means if a base is split and say xbox and sony have the same deal in place the publisher breaks even.
That is pretty much exactly what it's saying. It doesn't do anything to disincentive cross play. Just a safe guard to cover some lost revenue, which is a fairly reasonable thing. But everyone wants to immediately post "Fucking disgusting!" or "That is incredibly fucked up!" or some dumb shit without actually thinking about what the slide actually says. The OP title should be changed to something less imflamatory and you know, accurate.
OP
OP
You need to pay the 30% for the other console and then an extra 15%. How is that "break even"? The other console still gonna take their 30%!
They charge a fee if and only if the revenue is disproportionate relative to PS gameplay share. They even provide an example. If PS gameplay share is 95%, it wouldn't make much sense if only 60% of revenue comes from PS. That's why they charge a fee. It's not that hard to understand.
It's the same scenario it typically is - Misrepresented and alarmist thread title and lack of context in the OP, and a bunch of people that don't bother with the details or the context.
This has nothing to do with cross-play. This has to do with purchases from other platforms that Sony recognizes on its platform. That leaves epic the ability to sell skins on other platforms , existing or new, or even directly, or sell at discounted rates, and have a path to get those skins to be playable on Playstation.
Distributing the revenue by player engagement makes the most sense to average it all out and not have to look at individual user behaviour.
For me personally?
That's how:
I can play with people on other platforms, but I cannot have cross-progression, which is a feature ONLY missing on playstation.
There is so many scenarios where policy like that could easily gimp or outright remove any possiblity for corssplay/progression.
This is bad, for both devs and customers.
I don't agree with this and find it scummy, but it is business in our capitalist world.
Agreed, this could impact indie dev's more unfortunately, which is a shame.
Agreed, this could impact indie dev's more unfortunately, which is a shame.
Yeah, it's not totally analogous, but the whole "protect the platform" thing had a ton to do with the initial problems Apple had with Kindle (and since I don't use an iOS device I'm not sure what the state of things is with this now).
Emails Reveal Why Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller Blocked In-App Purchase of Kindle Books - MacRumors
In this case, Apple was arguably making the Kindle iOS app experience for the user worse by making it financially burdensome to do in-app purchases, or to even mention the purchases could be made elsewhere.
Actually I've learned ITT that you should, because god damn do they make great business decisions
This also explains why there are so many games that have crossplay between NSW - Xbox - PC and not PS.
Woof.
I'm pretty dumb but this sounds... bad. Don't know if it's standard procedure or not, but it doesn't look great.
I'm pretty dumb but this sounds... bad. Don't know if it's standard procedure or not, but it doesn't look great.
Free to play games you dont need PS+ for. On top of that even if you are paying for online in other titles, its not even just that anymore anyway with games as apart of PS+ thats what you are really paying for each month.
again for example if A Dev has a 50-50 split between them and say Xbox and both sony and xbox has a 30% cut, the split on one side or the other would be the dev paying at most 15% more on one side or the other on MTX only. Not game sales.
Isn't this about cross-progression, not cross-play? Seems like pretty standard stuff, definitely a little scummy, as I really doubt there's much in this for them, but can't say I'm surprised potential loss of revenue vs total players is a thing.
It doesn't, because what the contract describes is that unless you are planning to cheat Sony by incentizing your player base to buy dlc/ currency elsewhere, it is extremely unlikely that the disparity PSN use vs revenue would be more than 15%.
Basically, it's Sony agreeing to crossplay at no additional cost to the dev -unless- you are in bad faith.
Say there is PC and Console, MTX is bought on PC. The price is lower there and there is a 15% fee there. Its all over the place it all depends on where the MTX is and what the player base split is. At most a dev may pay 45% for the MTX And Min they pay 15% between all those transactions with the player base that could either end up breaking even, costing more or costing less. Its not a zero sum.
Going from how this thread is behaving, I feel like it isn't a super great idea to have a bunch of gamers on an Internet forum try to interpret an internal corporate documentation in a legal proceeding.
Why would it suck any profits? I doubt that any game has such disproportionate revenue to the point that Sony charged the devs a fee.
theres always more to these things. I know this stuff seems all salacious. But its really not, if it was then these companies would be suing like epic is doing apple today.
Or it's just people that understand that these corporations do a lot of "shitty" things along with the "good" stuff they do and they aren't going to melt down when something "shitty" is brought to the public.
Mega corporations aren't our friends and don't necessarily look out for what benefits the consumers the absolute most? Stunning.
We have devs on here. Surely someone can give us some ballpark userbase/revenue numbers and if they would be wildly inconsistent.
And even then, devs can literally have their game sold on a cheaper store, and drive MTX that way and can end up paying less for access to a larger platform.
There can be pretty simple reasons for someone buying on one platform and playing on the other, like simply having your payment information already saved or maybe you got gift cards or rewards that'd allow you to buy the mtx for cheaper. None of that would be related to the dev being in bad faith
Sony likely views their player base as a huge selling point and cross-play does provide that benefit to other platforms, makes sense they would want to monetize this
Hopefully the terms are reasonable for the low-earning devs, or heck maybe something like No Man's Sky would get crossplay for free since there are no MTX
Hopefully the terms are reasonable for the low-earning devs, or heck maybe something like No Man's Sky would get crossplay for free since there are no MTX
And as consumers the only thing we should care about is this will prevent smaller companies from offering crossplay as it would be a larger hit for them to give up revenue there by hurting us as consumers.
That makes sense. I actually don't know if PS4 prices for Genshin are worse or not.
No win for the consumer here. But I can see how it's a win for developers to get access to all of the players on the Sony system so they can can see other players with cool skins and gear and go buy them from the store. The developer takes a hit from the PSN cut but ultimately comes out on top because there are more people buying a digital product that you can reproduce infinitely. This is probably why it's not happening with Genshin, because there's a much smaller MP component and no skins, so no seeing what my friend Jade has and deciding to go spend some cash on it.