This is an excellent post.
It's also worth noting that Sony's paid exclusivity designed to keep content off of other platforms goes back to the back half of the PS3 generation, when they signed a deal with EA to bring entire games/game remakes (medal of honor and the dead space rail shooter, for instance--which had Move support but could be played with a normal controller, which is how I played it). It appeared at the time--and remains so--that Sony was very nervous about Microsoft building momentum that gen and they started playing pretty dirty shortly after. That Microsoft was explicitly asked if they would do the timed exclusivity model and outright rejected it in interviews around 2014 or so (memory fuzzy, can't recall correctly) speaks highly to Microsoft's leadership.
Microsoft's timed exclusivity has always been "this would not exist if we funded it." GTA4's DLC, for instance, which is the first timed content MS did that I know of, was not going to exist until MS funded its creation. To my knowledge, several other projects with timed exclusivity were funded entirely or mostly by Microsoft. There's nothing wrong with a moneyhat that brings a game into existence--if you give me twenty million dollars to make a game and ask for exclusivity in return, I will do that for you. I have, in fact, done that for a publisher (;D); there is everything wrong with a moneyhat that's a fraction of a game's budget, designed to keep games away from other platforms.
Sony's a bit different; Final Fantasy XVI would exist whether Sony moneyhatted it or not; the Capcom leak revealed that Sony isn't paying entire dev budgets to make these games happen, it's only a couple mil at most on games that are routinely in the 20-60 million dollar range. Sony's targeting has always been about damaging the competition, not enriching the platform. It has always been insidious; buying the worst managed publisher of all time from its owners so the devs have a fighting chance of making what they want and not be forced to waste their talents in the Call of Duty mines is a far cry from Sony's targeted moneyhatting.
By the by, we know this to be an absolute fact, because the confirmed Capcom leaks indicated Sony quite literally paid to keep MHWorld off the PC for a set period of time.
Incorrect. Microsoft's move was a really interesting one--their intention was to allow you to install games via a disc and then not have to use the discs anymore, which is a very pro-consumer move and would have been a fantastic feature. The DRM checkin function was meant to prevent people from cheating that--after all, if I could buy a $60 game, install it, then hand the disc to my friend and he could go install it and so on, then it would harm developers, which would in turn harm consumers.
The problem--which they could not overcome and which Mattrick fucked up royally on his public messaging (seriously, there are interviews in 2013/2014 where multiple MS people are saying completely different things)--was that this genuinely awesome idea could only work if you couldn't trade in games easily, and Microsoft was allegedly working on ways to fix that (by including a code with every game that you would have to rescind and keep with your copy of the game), but the fix was pretty shitty (because it required authorized resellers only, since you could not protect your consumers if anyone could have revocation access; the only way for this to work is if trusted parties could revoke keys and make them valid again before the game could be resold).
Ultimately, Microsoft went with digital-only consoles instead, just as Sony is, because digital is overwhelming the market. Being able to buy and sell your games is going the way of Blockbuster. It's not sustainable for Gamestop, the primary corporation that allows this, and most mom and pop stores that I've seen so far don't have large stocks of current-gen games, mostly 5-7th gen stuff.
Microsoft ended up being correct about their predictions, but NOT their implementation. As usual, Microsoft really did push gaming forward in terms of how digital content would be used and explored--Sony, as always, copied Microsoft's features, just like copying everything from accounts to achievements to digital storefronts--not the other way around. Sony hardware always plays it safe, looking at what its competitors do and copying them. The cost of this is sometimes Microsoft ends up with egg on its face when it fucks up its initial implementation, and Sony... never looks as bad for copying it, even when they fail to do as good a job as Microsoft does (like account name changes not working for years). That has changed in regards to back compat--MS looks great here (because they're improving games and game performance without requiring anything from the developer, it's just free for the dev because it's a value add to MS) and Sony looks terrible--and Sony's doing all sorts of little things like "we won't allow remasters unless you add in trophies" that are exacerbating this problem. Sony only ever experiments with largely safe stuff--stuff that's assumed to be widely popular (copying the Wii almost exactly, as opposed to Kinect being a meaningful iteration on the model), or stuff that's low risk and designed to lock you into the platform (like trying to make it so games have to use the touchpad gimmick or rumble triggers). That stuff's all meant to make it so those games are harder to be ported to other consoles, but it never meaningfully advances games as a medium; it's just designed to trap things on Sony devices.
Gamers don't know what anti-consumer means, man. If you did, you'd be loudly and roundly criticizing Sony for their continued and deliberately anticompetitive moneyhatting.
It was a great idea with horrible messaging and ultimately execution that just could not have ever worked simply enough for players to be happy with it. But if you look at it, nearly everything Microsoft pushed for at the beginning of the gen, that all actually happened. Sony fell in line with Microsoft, not the other way around. Just look at everything Microsoft messaged and everything Microsoft did, then look at what the PS4 was at the start of the gen and how Sony pivoted around Microsoft's plans, not the other way around. The only things MS really got wrong were Kinect (understandable, the Kinect was the fastest selling electronic device of all time when it launched, it makes sense their number crunchers would think sentiment was high) and the "install from disc and then do not require the disc to be in the console at all times as DRM." Discs themselves serve as a form of DRM; you can't play the game at all without the disc in the drive. Removing that and making it so there was a check-in every few weeks was less restrictive than requiring a disc to be in the console at all times, but at the cost of reselling, which is why MS ultimately backed off it.
People love to mock them for the "tv" angle but forget that A) the most used app on the 360 by far at the end of the 360 generation were YouTube and Netflix, not games, and B) the actual time they spent on TV at the reveal was half or slightly less than half, and then at E3 a few weeks later, they were 100% in on games--as I recall, Sony actually talked more about non-gaming things than MS did at the PS4's first E3 lol.
Last edited:
