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Sony Europe's Exclusive Game Deals Raise Ire

Posted by simoniker on from the spoiling-everyone-else's-fun dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Eurogamer has an editorial up about Sony Europe's recent practice of paying for PS2-exclusive titles from Namco, Ubisoft, Rockstar and others for European release. The author doesn't seem to mind short-term platform exclusives too much, as long as there's a PC version around at the same time, but complains loudly about Kill.Switch and I-Ninja, which were both released on other formats in the USA but are permanently exclusive to the PS2 in Europe." What do you think of hardware manufacturers locking in games to certain platforms, whether a territorial decision or a universal one?

2 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Europeans will always circumvent restrictions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative
    So what's to keep Europeans from buying the US version of the game and running it on other formats? Should I start up a web site to sell stuff that is restricted in EU but available in USA into the EU market?

    Two things

    1. Region Lockout - Xbox and PS2 have Region encoding in the same way that DVD's have region encoding. You would need a European Xbox to play European titles and the same for PS2.

    2.NTSC/PAL - Most European countries use PAL video encoding which runs at a refresh rate of 25 fps and a slightly higher resolution than NTSC which runs at 29.977 fps. NTSC is used in the US and Japan and NTSC televisions are incapable of displaying PAL signals properly.

  2. Missing the point by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I don't think any of you are actually getting the point. The deal is here, that a game (eg Prince of Persia : Sands of Time), comes out in the US on all consoles, but in other parts of the world, Sony uses it's market power to delay the release of the game for months on end, giving uninformed gamers the impression that the product in question that it won't be coming out on other consoles. This is completely different from Splinter Cell, which came out on the XBox first because it was the best console for it, and then Sony PAID Ubisoft the total cost of porting the engine to the PS2 when they found out how big the games' market was. Using money to delay the release of an already finished product to artifically increase sales of said product on your platform is a bullshit idea.