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Sony Attacks Microsoft's Publishing Policies
winston18 writes "Sony's vice president of publisher relations has gone on record as saying that Microsoft is protecting an inferior technology with their policies regarding content on Xbox Live Arcade and multiplatform titles. The comments stem from Microsoft's admission that they reserve the right to deny titles on Xbox Live if they launch on the PlayStation Network first."
Sony, who is known to pay millions towards Rockstar (with GTA series) and other developers to make PlayStation exclusives and offering them special deals, is saying Microsoft's policies are wrong when they try to fight against this old stupid shit with consoles?
I guess all the old OtherOS, PSN network hacking and other fiasco wasn't enough for Sony.
A lot of developers have been publicly complaining about Xbox Live, calling it too closed. Even Gabe Newell of Valve--who used to work at Microsoft--criticized Live for being too restrictive because Microsoft wouldn't allow Valve to use Steam. Meanwhile, Sony not only allows Steam but lets Valve offer a free copy of the PC and Mac version to buyers of the PS3 version of Portal 2.
Microsoft has ridden the success of Halo and Gears of War, and the 360 was easier to develop for when people were learning how to work with the PS3, but sales of the PS3 are surpassing the 360 this year, and PS3 developers have caught up. In addition, the poor reception to Microsoft's focus on motion gaming as well as a lack of an answer to mobile gaming signals a diminishing of the their position to third place.
I can't see this as anything other than one giant who uses customer hostile strategies to profit complaining about another giant using customer hostile strategies to accomplish the same goal. Boo hoo, poor Sony.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
So, make Linux the next OS for PS4!
That would help discussions with Microsoft.
They have been in the console market for ten years now and they still think they can buy/bribe/threaten their way to beating Sony and Nintendo.
Sony has some 21 first party studios.
Nintendo has about 10.
Microsoft has only 3 or so first party studios.
So Microsoft is forced to play the bribe and threaten crap with publishers since they have almost nothing in the way of exclusive games to compete with Sony and Nintendo's huge first party lineups.
No wonder they went from distant 2nd place last gen to last place this gen.
Personally I think "Exclusive" title arrangements should be illegal. But as long as developers can get a premium fee for making their work platform-exclusive, we'll have to put up with the practice.
Then again, given the shitty quality of some ports, maybe it'd be better if all developer's focused on one platform first and got it right before they tried tacking other development environments.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
A giant corporation with huge market power is pointing out that another giant corporation with huge market power is creating a barrier to entry that, gasp, favors inferior technology?
Does Sony not know what barriers to entry are? Do they think barriers to entry are used to protect superior goods and services? (hint: superior goods and services do not need protection) What -- if not such barriers -- do they think is the cost of entrenched incumbency?
Let me present the rough outline of the economic cost of entrenched incumbency: The problem with entrenched incumbents is that they use their market biasing power to create barriers to entry that favor their inferior-value goods and services over superior-value competition (eg: disruptive competition). That is what an entrenched incumbent is. It is the definition. Water is wet. Vacuums suck. Entrenched incumbency implies protection of inferior-value goods and services.
OK, perhaps I am being too hard on them. Well done, Sony: Typically entrenched incumbents avoid pointing out the fundamental problem with entrenched incumbents for fear that their own entrenched incumbency will be threatened. Bravo, Sony, for pointing out that the kettle is black. Would that it were truly self-sacrifice; I suspect they simply believe the public and/or government will not grasp that Sony is a pot.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
This reminds me of the late 70's and the Cola/Burger wars. I guess a lot of it has to do with the current economic climate and declining(?) revenue, just like back in the Carter days.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The online multiplayer in Xbox Live may be too closed for some well-known developers, but not all services in the Xbox Live brand are "too closed". Sony still has no counterpart to Xbox Live Indie Games that I know of. I tried to check Sony's TPR web site, but it's been down for over four months.
Let's just sum up Sony and the PS3:
* Free online for every gamer instead of forcing gamers to pay online fees every year
* Cheap and easy harddrive upgrades with off the shelf laptop drives
* Have spent their profits on building up a gargantuan first party array of developers instead of using that money to gimp content on other platforms
* Have spent their money on the highest quality engineering and manufacturing instead of rushing out the door shoddy and poorly designed hardware
Yeah, big bad Sony. Really sticking it to console gamers...
Wow. The kings of closed-source hardware that have done everything possible to attack home-brew development and hacking efforts have the audacity to attack another closed platform for closed platform behavior. This is the same company that has the nerve to consider a 250GB hard drive system a premium product. The same company that used Nintendo R&D to come up with a 32bit platform and weaseled the development away from Nintendo with legal maneuvers leaving Nintendo without an up-to-date console for nearly 5 years. (S)ome (O)ld (N)intendo s(Y)stem. This company's conduct makes me want to puke.
Barriers to protect entrenched incumbency have been the rule in TV gaming since 1985, when Nintendo introduced the NES with a lockout chip. The biggest theoretical hope to fight it is probably the home theater PC, but none of the major PC makers appears to want to launch its HTPC brand with the kind of promotion with which a console maker launches a new console.
Fanboy, you're trying to hard.
Cuz when it comes to inferior, few know it like Sony.
Microsoft needs to hire some real whiz engineering geeks, like gates himself was back in the days and need to follow that. Its too damn busy protecting the assets it has with dirty business practice. Its a win-lose situation I guess: Be nice and loose some market segments and have a good name... OR loose some segments and bring the reputation up.
Microsoft has been preying on other markets and segments that *others* are targeting while having no regard for the market they control. It has the most powerfull weapon in the world: the most commonly used operating system in the world and STILL it tries to take other markets in a completely stupid way (lawsuits, patents, buyout and destroy,...).
Even the main product: Windows, its development model is completely flawed. Where in the software-world do you see developers chucking out all their code ever 3 -4 years and starting over? If they had kept the main code of xp and kept improving it they would have reached a stage with the OS by now that I'd be glad to switch back from linux... But heck, lets make something visually more appealing, throw out all our old stuff and reinvent the wheel every 3 years because you can sell it off AGAIN as completely innovative... meanwhile lose the people that kept(keep) this windows community alive: the hardcore geeks who are TIRED of random bsod, hangs, unresponsiveness, hardware issue, driver issues, security flaws, ....
Guess its time for new, real, geek leadership at microsoft. Someone who inherently understands this market... not some faker MBA :)
Microsoft are being dicks here, but XBL is head and shoulders above PSN precisely because it is a fully walled and controlled garden.
Or perhaps PSN is just overwhelmed by all those mandatory system update downloads to remove more PS3 features?
It really is amazing just how badly microsoft has failed in the console market.
> They blew 4 billion for what was effectively a tie for distant last place with on their first attempt
> They had to pull the first xbox from the market because it was nothing but a bunch of overpriced desktop pc parts thrown in a big ugly black box
> They rushed out the door the poorly designed and defective xbox 360 a year early
> The xbox 360's graphics hardware was so weak that it was called the xbox 1.5
> They piss off their only major first party developer bungie so bad they leave the company
> They are left with just rare(a basketcase), lionhead(and their constant unfulfiled hype), and turn 10(microsoft's failed attempt at creating a gran turismo killer)
> Even with millions of duplicate xbox 360 sold from the rrod fiasco, they still end up in last place in worldwide sales this gen
> And now in 2011 the only thing microsoft has to hype is some piece of crap sony eye toy ripoff
No wonder microsoft is so desperate.
So no, it isn't working.
always hilarious...and sad.
Wow, this guy's reply wins the Internet. He's comparing the Libyan's (yes that's how you spell Libya) fighting and dying for their country against a foul dictator to a Console where you get called a fag within 5 minutes of joining any game of COD... oh, and you pay for the right to be made fun of by a bunch of prepubescent children.
Console Gaming is on the decline anyway.
While the PS3, XBox360 and Wii are great systems on their own, Sony, Nintendo and even Microsoft are still dinosaurs of the Gaming industry.
PS3 sales have been inflated by the fact that it was the best value BluRay Player on the market for years. Now, sub-$200 BluRay Players are making the $400 PS3 look more like the niche product that it is.
While the Kinect has boosted XBox sales almost as much as the Red-Ring-Of-Death did, it is still a fad. People are using their Kinect for niche tasks like 3D-imaging rather than gaming. The Kinect was one of Make:Magazines most Hackable Gadgets, and that could a major factor in driving sales of what is still a niche product.
Wii Fit has made the Wii the "housewife's second-best-friend" of gaming consoles and has inflated sales as well. Once again, it is turning out to be just a fad. It is the most consumer-friendly gaming console of the big three, which explains it's much higher sales figures, but it is still of limited appeal to the average consumer.
While their always will be Dead-beat stoners who spend their profits from their hydroponic operation to continue buying XBox's and PS3, as well as high-pressure professionals who want some mindless downtime when they get home from work, Console gaming is not where it's at at the moment. I doubt their will be much of a Console Gaming comeback in the future either.
Fucking amateur.
I am glad that on Slashdot people can talk rationally about anything that relates to Sony and Microsoft.
Sounds like sony is just sucking sour grapes. its perfectly fine when they do under the table deals to keep publishers from releasing multiplatform games sometimes up to a year later but no one else.
You lost this race sony, quit making excuses for your own doing. You have a white elephant that was more expensive than a neo-geo, took years to get your cost down, bet on blu-ray that most people dont give a shit about, took fucking forever to get games out, other OS, and the psn CC leak
yea its Microsoft's fault, and that had a what 90% failure ratio?
I'll explain the title of my post towards the end. Regarding the two digital-distribution marketplaces that Microsoft maintain, however, Microsoft are so schizophrenic with regard to how they operate both XBLA and XBLIG that it's rather stomach-churning.
The fact of the matter is that when the Xbox 360 originally came out, you would see maybe 1 to 2 titles every 1 to 2 weeks released on XBLA. XBLA was touted as the way for smaller, more "indie" development houses to develop games on the X360 platform without having to deal with all of the ins and outs of manufacturing, distribution, and more restrictive technical certification requirements that come with a disc-based game. Microsoft were highly selective over the titles that would be released on XBLA, and for good reason - they needed an online marketplace with many "strong" titles and few "weak" ones.
After so many "indie" development houses complained that they were not being allowed to market such obvious smash hits as "Try Not To Fart" or "Controller Vibrator 2000" - note the intended sarcasm - Microsoft created the XBLIG marketplace, touting that as the new place for smaller, more "indie" development houses to put games onto the X360 platform.
This went well for perhaps 6 to 12 months, with a few particularly good indie games making their way to the top of the XBLIG charts, and all of the undeserving fluff and blatant cash grabs fell to the bottom of the pile, at which point the wheels fell off. Microsoft felt the need to take things in a third direction, now choosing to "upgrade" specific XBLIG dev houses to XBLA contracts.
In doing so, they signed the death warrant for both XBLA and XBLIG. Removing the more polished indie dev houses from the XBLIG marketplace ensured that XBLIG continues to play second fiddle to XBLA, but more importantly, it means that the XBLA marketplace is now flooded with "lesser" games that would otherwise have remained on the XBLIG marketplace (and for good reason). Now, it is much more difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff on the XBLA marketplace, and there is no wheat on the XBLIG marketplace.
Despite all of this, Microsoft insist that they are "top dog" regarding their digital marketplaces, to the point of taking blatant advantage over dev houses they perceive as "smaller" when those dev houses come a-knocking to try to get their games released on XBLA. In the case of Minecraft, the sad fact is that the Xbox 360 is the only console (handhelds excluded) on which it will be released, specifically because Microsoft forced Mojang into an exclusive contract. The entire matter is sickening.
They have been in the console market for ten years now and they still think they can buy/bribe/threaten their way to beating Sony and Nintendo.
Sony has some 21 first party studios.
Nintendo has about 10.
Microsoft has only 3 or so first party studios.
Woah, wait a second. Where the crap did you get that? Wikipedia says that Sony has sixteen first-party studios, Nintendo has eighteen, and Microsoft has eleven. Some of the games that are made by studios like Level-5, Next Level Games or Insomniac are actually second-party studios that are not directly owned by the companies they collaborate with (especially Level-5, who releases games pretty much everywhere).
I don't know where you did your research, but that's REALLY misleading (and a little biased towards Sony, there). Microsoft publishes quite a bit of first-party content, even though it's not as much as Sony or Nintendo (especially Nintendo, even more so if you count their HUGE list of second-party studios).
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
The Xbox 360's online was down for all of December 2007...
Way to make a complete fool out of yourself fanboy.
Microsoft forcing people to pay 60 dollars a year for laggy P2P based online gaming is a sad joke. No wonder Microsoft is in last place this gen.
A fanboy quoting wikipedia edited by other fanboys posting fake sales numbers!
Hilarious!
Polyphony is a first party Sony studio dimwit.
It is no surprise that someone so fucking stupid would be a fan of the biggest piece of shit console in history, the RRoDbox 360.
Hey, while you're at it, how about some fake vgchartz.com numbers made up by the 20 year old Xbox fanboy who runs the site?
Rushing the piece of shit Xbox 360 out the door a year early.
200 dollars cheaper than the PS3.
Millions and millions of duplicate Xbox 360 sold from the RRoD fiasco and other hardware failures.
And the Xbox 360 still ends up in last place.
Epic Fail Microsoft.
Microsoft's first party console developers are:
Rare - basketcase
Lionhead - unfulfilled hype
Turn 10 - failed Polyphony wannabes
and I guess the people who have taken over the Halo crap after Bungie bailed on Microsoft.
Everything else is just padding to try to hide Microsoft's joke of a first party lineup.
As a former console developer I would like to know what that Sony asshat is smoking.
The SPUs, which have considerable processing power, do not make up for the rest of the crappy architecture of the PS3.
The OS is crap, the GPU is crap, the APIs are crap (except for gcm) and the security is crap. I was the guy who wrote the graphics engines and a lot of the SPU code (for the devloper I worked for) and I can tell you that the PS3 is a boat anchor for cross platform developers.
Here's an example; The SPUs seem very fast at 3.2GHz compared to the VUs from the PS2 at 300MHz. That is until you actually try to do anything like multiply a vector by a matrix. PS2 could do it in 4 cycles dispatch, and 3 additional cycles latency. So you could do vector times matrix every 4 cycles in a tight loop. PS3 needs at least 10 cycles dispatch with a total latency over 50 cycles. If you really bust your ass interleaving loops you can get down to 15 cycles or so per vertex because Sony forgot both masked writes and broadcast math in the SPU architecture. Idiots, it was there in the PS2! Where you high when you signed off on the SPU design?
I could spend hours ragging on the design of the PS3 but I'll just say Sony really dropped the ball on the PS3 design as a whole. While it stomps the 360 on total CPU power it's much easier getting the games where you want them on the 360.Why should anyone develop for the PS3 when it costs at least double for the same finished quality?
I'm glad I don't have to deal with their shit any more.
If you go and tell Target that you'll sell them something exclusively for awhile before you sell to other retailers, you may well find that Walmart, Best Buy and so on blacklist you. They don't like you trying to give a competitor an advantage so they'll say "Ok you want to go exclusive with them, you do that, but it is a permanent thing. We aren't going to let you give them a boost, and then give yourself a sales boost by using our store space."
Same shit with pricing. You generally can't give highly preferential pricing to one retailer or the others will retaliate.
Remember: It is 100% your right to determine who you do and do not wish to sell to. However it is 100% the stores' right to determine what they do and do not wish to stock. If you do something that they believe hurts them, they are within their rights to tell you to fuck off.
Similar deal here. If Sony bribes you to release your content first on PSN, ok that is their right, and your right to accept the deal. Nobody is going to say you can't. However MS is not then interested in carrying your product. They don't want you trying to boost Sony's platform by releasing there first, and then to improve your sales by going to MS's market later.
Just saying.
Nobody cares what the CAPTCHA for your post was.
Netscape/Firefox did not have an answer to ActiveX
Of course it did: NPAPI.
Are you seriously suggesting forcing developers to develop for multiple, independent platforms? You'd kill all but the largest studios, since a guy eating ramen isn't going to live long enough to get his game done for PS3 and XBox360 and Wii.
A single guy eating ramen is going to develop for the PC running Windows because Nintendo is known not to want individual developers working from home (source: warioworld.com). Case in point: Bob's Game, whose developer was denied a devkit solely due to working from home. I assume Sony is the same way, given its removal of Other OS from the PS3 system software. (I'd check for PS3 developer qualifications, but Sony TPR appears to have been down for four months.) So only large enough studios can afford to develop for consoles in the first place.
there isn't a monopoly in consoles
But there is a cartel: all three platforms are allegedly over-curated, and it's hard for indie developers to get on board. If there weren't a cartel, why wouldn't a PC maker try to make its home theater PC offering into the fourth console by promoting it to non-geeks?
Also, Sony might've made the headlines for removing Other OS functionality, but comparing that to other consoles is disingenuous considering they all never offered the option at all.
What is Sony's counterpart to Xbox Live Indie Games? Apple's counterpart is the App Store.
Console Gaming is on the decline anyway.
In favor of what? PC gaming? Let me know when a PC maker starts selling a home theater PC that appeals to people other than geeks and I'll agree.
The best we can hope for is "no survivors".
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Am I the only one who got the headline wrong in the first attempt?
Americans are the nazis who won the war and nothing else.
With the Wii we know a console sold does not equal market share as it may be gathering dust in the closet. For the 360 we know they got an insane failure rate and especially American customers seem to think it is perfectly normal to buy a second one instead of insisted the first one be repaired for free.
Meanwhile Sony is not above a little channel stuffing and their hardware is of course used in super computers by the US. Since the US army can build cheap super computers out of them, why wouldn't others?
What market share do the consoles really have? Impossible to tell. You mention kinect vs move. However the real story is both suck donkey balls and just what percentage of kinect sales went to people wanting to play with it on their PC?
I think this round of the console wars has no clear winner and could teach us all a really valuable lesson if we stopped wanting to pick favorites.
There is no way to win a round on a single metric. Profit? MS costs are more then 360 development, they need to recover the original xbox sales too as WELL as the hurt to their other product line, games for windows. Great going MS, you cannibalized you Windows platform for games to be made exclusive to the x-box but that means I can now run OSX or Linux on my desktop since there are no games left to play that force me into having a Windows OS around (Check how much the OSX offering of games has become recently). Also, might it console sales have something to do with how easily it is cracked? How are the software sales? World wide?
Nintendo outsold everyone easily yet that didn't lead to gigantic software sales and with their next console they seem to desperately want to win the hardcore gamer back who wants a bit more then a gymnastics game. So... how do we count that one? Huge win in hardware sales, lost core audience, lost on software sales... winner of most consoles gathering dust? Whoot!
Meanwhile Sony has launched the most expensive console, yet one of its flagship and must have products, FF MMORPG, still doesn't run on it but a humble cheap PC can run it for free? Guess as expensive as the PS3 was, it was beat nearly at launch with the most powerfull PC's of the time and now you can get the cheapest dell and beat the pants of cell (that rhymes!). Might have helped performance more if they had put an ordinary DVD in it and put the money towards a faster HD or even just plain more memory (biggest limit to the PS3 at the moment according to a dutch developer I talked to, you spend a lot of the computing resources just trying to get data in to the fucking machine). Yes Sony is increasing the sales now it has made a price drop but so what? The next race about to start and do they really want to be known as the console maker that you can best buy half a decade after release because it only starts to get decent then?
Meanwhile Blizzard and Valve been making hand over fist on the humble PC, making friends and not enemies. The biggest upcoming games are MMORPG's and they just don't seem to be able to exist on the consoles for some reason... The PC is dead, long live the PC.
Oh and Mac is now in the race as well with more then a few good games on OSX and of course all those iOS games.
Meanwhile the 3DS bombed like only a Nintendo 3D product can bomb and the next PSP is... well we talk about that when it actually launches shall we?
Basically, if you are not a fanboy this console war has no winners. A lot of times a single article will claim one by using a single metric while ignoring all other evidence or even use that single metric world wide.
Be interesting to see what the next generation will bring. The WiiU or whatever it is name is seems to ditch the two handed motion devices. Or do they want you to wave that huge screen around because people so love looking at a screen that they got to wave about at the same time? Might motion actually be dead for the next generation? They certainly can't tag it on again after a few years, that would like a money grab.... oh wait like Sony
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I can go into any of these stores you mention at WILL and buy these clothes from exclusive lines. NO prior investment needed. To play a game exclusive to a console I need to buy that console first.
So your examples have nothing in common with the situation.
Smart move kid.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"In the case of Minecraft, the sad fact is that the Xbox 360 is the only console (handhelds excluded) on which it will be released, specifically because Microsoft forced Mojang into an exclusive contract."
According to Notch, the creator of Minecraft, they aren't on Steam for a completely different reason, not because MS forced their hand.
Why No steam notch
Both sides are clearly fanbois in disguise, like what we need is another flamewar
When Sony can secure a goddamn network, THEN they can start bitching about other companies. As far as I'm concerned, Sony needs to just STFU for I dunno... a DECADE or so after the debacle of their lack of security. I'll NEVER buy a Sony product again. New OR used. Period.
Microsoft has also closed many of their internal development studios, and are no longer partners with Bungie. Naturally they want to solidify their third party lineup and prevent any kind of exclusives on other platforms, so they can draw attention from the lack of their own first party exclusives, and this way they may wind up with third party exclusives to make up for that.
Except there is nothing to prevent a new console maker from offering a product.
The fact that the major PC makers aren't willing to commit resources toward building a stable, supported home theater PC platform (as you suggested in another comment) shows that there's still some entry barrier that none of us on Slashdot have yet been able to characterize.
Sony has in fact supported smaller studios before
So how does one sign up? As I said above, the TPR web site linked from this press release has been down for four months.
LOL, what a fucking loser.
Nothing but downgraded PC ports for games.
Shitty Sony EyeToy style shovelware.
The shitty Xbox controller.
Shitty Xbox 360 level graphics.
Forced to pay 60 dollars a year for laggy P2P based online.
Golly, can't imagine why the RRoDbox ended up in last place this gen.
Hilarious to imagine this fuckstain brkello waving his faggot hands around in the latest piece of shit Kinect turd of a game.