-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
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
This is not healthy competition, this is leveraging their position to remain dominant, just like how they are able to more easily attain third party deals with well known franchises. Holding back from supporting cross platform and cross progression is a healthy market place? News to me.
Why are we sympathetic for a company who was never known to be a gaming company but rather an electronics company? They eroded their market share over the years in those areas because of stronger competition from the likes of Samsung? Just because they require more profits now from PlayStation does not create a healthy marketplace. It just means Sony will have to be more bullish than they already are with third party publishers.
Xbox enjoys the backing of a $1.8 trillion behemoth that regards their gaming division as a convenient consumer-level brand marketing strategy if it bleeds money. Microsoft will flex their advantage of being able to continually fund an unprofitable Xbox for years if customers regard the brand positively. Their place in the gaming market would need to hit Zune or Windows Mobile levels before the plug is pulled.
Sony is a $120 billion company because of PlayStation alone. They also have to push their advantage where they can. It's called competition. It's what happens when there isn't a monopoly.
I don't actually care about what's being talked about in this line of comments but, I will point out that if you use specific quarters of specific years you can find whatever you're looking for to fit what you want.I'm sorry, but what? This Sony?
You never answered how blocking crossplay and cross progression is healthy competition. All you've said so far is Sony needs to be the aggresssor more than anyone because of reasons and can manipulate the market because they can.
The Xbox division is held to the same standards of profitability as any other division. It's not a 'brand positivity' thing or whatever. MS has happily pulled the plug on reasonably well regarded consumer devices like the Surface Band.
it's been stated before, but there was a chance xbox could have been shuttered in the past, until Spencer outlined the plan for Satya.
Sony's cross-platform strategy hopes to maintain their lead over Microsoft. It's healthy because there is no risk of it eliminating the competition or shrinking the number of companies competing in the marketplace. They aren't deceiving customers. It's a straight-forward and in no way dishonest policy. The market will reflect whether it was a good decision.
This is an unfair accusation to make, since he probably just grabbed what he could find. The Q3 FY2020 results don't look dramatically different from this. Gaming goes up from 19% to 22%. Music also grew from 13% here to around 17%.
Thast an interesting definition of "healthy" Lol.
And there is nothing straight forward and honest about a decision made and intended to be kept behind closed doors and serves as a disencentive to other companies to engage in a consumer beneficial practice.
Jesus, people, you can like a platform without literally turning into a PR rep for every soulless corporate policy they put out.
Right, protecting the children was in no way being deceiteful. We also never knew this payback from Epic which is the only reason Sony was going to allow it until the documents were opned, which Sony wanted sealed up again.
All I can say is finally it looks like we have a healthy marketplace giving consumers options. Switch is selling like gangbusters, you cannot find a PS5 or Series X, PC is being more supported than ever and great games are coming because each now has a healthy amount of internal studios. Anyone who thinks only one is a good option or any are bad options has their eyes closed.
Are you surpised some won't call it like it is? They enjoy a player who is dominant, it makes their purchase that much easier, then they can say fuck you I got mine.
Yeah my undergrad in Econ is admittedly over a decade old, but I don't think at any point I was led to believe, or that any reasonable work in the field would lead one to conclude that leveraging your position as a market leader to engage in rent-seeking behavior constitutes a optimally "healthy" marketplace simply because an already oligopoly market is propped up by a small few other mega corps where barriers to entry are near insurmountable, but because of that they can weather these asymmetric tactics.
Your opinion is not "how it is". I personally don't care whether Sony is #1 or #2. Being a PlayStation customer is of course easy. Been a fan for decades.
Fretting this much over a cross-play policy to frame Sony as the unprincipled dominator would seem less disingenuous if their competition wasn't Microsoft. Easily the most shit crazy aggressive company of the last 40 years.
I'd say in the console space Microsoft's pretty easily been the best actor among the big 3 historically but they've also been in it the least amount of time and never in a dominating position like the other two. Each of the Big 3 have had their moments but both Nintendo and Sony have gone much farther than, erm, shit-crazy aggressive Microsoft.
This isn't terribly surprising consider how much drug their feet on crossplay; I would imagine they were working out this sort of legalise in that time.
None of these multinationals pay my bills. I got zero sympathy for all of them :P
When I Googled for the data, I ended up getting linked back to Era's own thread doing the numbers breakdown. The specific quarter is pretty irrelevant though because Playstation was never even a majority of Sony's revenue at point in time, ever (though I think they might've been more than half of the profits at some point during the PS2 days).
You still have yet given any reasonable explanation how controlling the marketplace and telling developers you wont support cross play or cross progression is an indication of a healthy market unless they get recessions put in place. Sounds more like we want to control third party publishers because we have the leverage to do so, not because a healthy marketplace exists.
This has just turned into what we've known all along, console warrioring between Microsoft and Sony and you not being able to let go of your baggage.
You act like we're buying a fucking Lamborghini here. They're sub $500 plastic boxes that anyone can enjoy at any time with multiple price levels and content buying choices (retail, digital, and subscription). This isn't ever fuck you I got mine when you can pretty easily slip into another ecosystem. I mean the whole Series S/GP story is basically showing people that having one system is silly when you can have a whole other ecosystem for a fraction of the cost of previous generations.
That said, being dominant comes with sometimes making offensively strong choices. The Bethesda acquisition was the best and worst thing that could have happened to gaming. Fortnite and other highly MTX driven games is another. Sony trying to keep a portion of MTX dollars in their hands sounds bad, but I would imagine the alternative here would have been for Sony to pull an Apple and kick them off the platform for keeping the money to themselves, no?
I'm not sure how you equate buying a publisher who wanted to sell, to a hold out in something that benefits everyone but you do you.
Its not like Sony didn't do The same thing with Psygnosis but whose counting.
I'm not exactly happy about crossplay for the record, but when Bethesda publishes future games on PS5 and Switch I'll get on Sony's back about their policies. That would benefit everyone, right?
The Psygnosis reference was nice but a bit of a stretch :)
Didn't Psygnosis still release multiplatform games after the being owned by Sony?
Nothing stopping Insomniac from making Sunset Overdrive 2, I'm sure that will be on Xbox right? Same with all those PCVR games but I guess those examples somehow don't fit your criteria of what counts as 1st party or not once they get bought out or are we being naive now when studios gets bought? Pleaase tell me of all of these studios Sony had when they released the PS1 and how they managed to get more since then?
Any other words of wisdom?
Wipeout remained Playstation only after.
This thread is still rocking? Haha. As I posted before, I can totally understand Sony decision and dont think it is unreasonable at all, but I would never call it "healthy" lol healthy would be all out cross play cross progression cross save games no strings attached no ratios to go over or under etc, but that would obviously be a dream scenario that would never happen in a capitalist society. At the end of the day companies want money, and if you have more money you are more worried about losing market share. Sony did it the same way I believe Microsoft would if they were the market leaders (which is difficult for some to see because of the mythical aura around Phil and Xbox since when they started taking quite a few pro consumer decisions - because they also see them as pro company decisions).
Not exactly multiplatform but Saturn, PC and even N64 got some late ports and releases for several years after the 1993 buyout as Psygnosis remained a distinct publisher that Sony just happened to own. Then in 2000 SCE took direct action, fired most Psygnosis staff, shut down regional offices and just kept one team (the F1/Wipeout group) renaming it Studio Liverpool. That was really the death of Psygnosis.
In 7 years while Bethesda might look very different, I sort of doubt they will share that fate.