You're right. Believing what the media says, no matter how little the source knows, oversimplifying, and not thinking about it all makes it a lot easier to believe that MS was just being evil.
By the way, you contradicted yourself. If that's such a great place to market the PS2, then just taking them away sounds foolish. Even a PS2 attract mode is better than no machine at all. "Well, the XBOX is here, where's Sony's PS2? I dunno, guess Sony doesn't think that highly of it." Sony was just trying to make MS look bad. What a bunch of babies.
... that a lot of ads in a theatre show a website? Particularly if you go to a theater with a slideshow in the beginning? I always thought it was kinda weird. How am I expected to jot down an URL unless it is for a movie itself? Is this a way of getting a little extra ad revenue?
If so, I'm not 100% sure it'd work. I wouldn't bring my laptop to a theater. I'm just not used to carrying anything into a theater. Still, being able to post my gripes about Rollerball on Slashot would have been worth bringing my laptop...
First off, PS2 wasn't kicked out of CeBit. Sony just pulled it out. All MS could do was have CeBit management say that PS2's have to be manned by Sony reps.
Secondly, I already explained why I'm thinking there's more to the store several times in this thread.
Here's a summary: - It's not a games trade show. MS has nothing to gain by being the leader of the show. Nobody in the game reporting world is covering CeBit.
Go to IGN.com, for example. There is absolutely no mention of CeBit anywhere, especially in the XBOX or Sony section. You'd think that a story like that would make it there, but it didn't. Hmmm... do you quite possibly think that it's because that show has 0 bearing on the games industry?
That's why I don't think Microsoft was simply bullying at this show, there had to have been something that precipitated it.
"Also you completely ignore, that we might possibly have enough facts and it's just another instance of Microsoft bullying the competition."
Yeah yeah, whatever. Pardon me for actually putting an ounce of thought into it before saying "I believe everything the media says. We must obey. We must obey. We have no will of our own." Im a real bad person for this.
Gee. Poor you. Somebody in that company didn't make a very good move. Here in the real world, lots of companies trade RnD funding to Marketing funding and get a broader appeal. If an MS product doesn't work for you, find another solution . A sales pitch is not a gun being pointed to your head.
As for MS playing by the rules, I'm not defending the company as a whole. Im saying that we don't know the whole story of what happened. Everybody is drawing conclusions, likening this event to how MS does business, and I'm saying open your eyes and figure out what really happened. You could blindly assume that MS didn't like having competition at a trade show, or you could actually think about what happened and determine a more likely scenario. Face it, CeBit is not a game trade show. It's not worth trying to assert dominance there. It does 0% good, yet the probability of it backfiring on them is high. I think Sony did something to cause MS to complain. You have to remember that Sony is not much different from MS. They play hardball too. If they tried to play hardball with MS, it'd explain why MS would fight back. I can't believe anybody would read a story with such vague details in it and then draw conclusions on it. That is just DUMB.
I don't have any problem with you hating MS, particularly if they have screwed you. That doesn't mean that they're guilty of every little thing people accuse them of. Sony wasn't following the rules, and MS was. When the balance tipped in Sony's favor, MS complained. Netscape did this to MS, but nobody was mad at Netscape about it. The only real reason CeBit is an issue at all is that people hate MS.
As for MS costing money in the long run, in my company nearly everybody is running 2000 on their desktops with very little maintainence necessary, and most of the servers are running Linux. We made the decision that MS was the Desktop Solution, and Linux was the server solution. This is called an informed decision. We spend very little time/money to maintain them, and they all work reliably. We're not having to lay anybody off. Anybody managing by marketing documents really needs to go back to college. It's certainly not MS's fault.
Im curious about Max Payne for the GC, though. The hardware is far better on GC (and lots more RAM )than the PS2. I don't understand how they could port to PS2 and not the GC... Do you have a source of info on that? *Puzzled*
Considering the texture compression that GC has, plus the added RAM, what about the GC made it a problem?
On the PS2, they have to halve the verticle resolution just to have workable RAM to do stuff with...
Umm... okay. So every single person at MS (in the thousands...) acts like a Borg? Hating Microsoft is starting to shift from being cool to being absurd.
"MS had to pay more people'? No, MS would have chosen to, in contrast to Sony."
No, they had to. MS is under the watchful eye of everybody there. They have to follow the rules or everybody will hound them.
As for what's unfair about it? Have you ever been to a trade show? In any case, it's CeBit's rules, not MS's. If you have a problem, take it up with them. The way I see it, Sony shouldn't have been breaking the rules. Tough shit that they got caught
"I read this story yesterday - I wish I'd submitted it and reversed the Sony and MS roles. The feedback here would have been much different I'll bet."
Heh I doubt it. It probably wouldn't have bee accepted unless it was twisted as MS being at fault. People here don't understand that if you consistantly call a company guilty of something it didn't do, the somebody worse is gonna come along and make everybody wish MS was still around. All you have to do is be in conflict with MS, and you'll have support. You don't have to be better than them.
If you really narrow your perspective, you'll say things like "How's playing a game diffrent from fiddling witha laptop?" Obviously CeBit sees a difference and they made a rule about it. Ask them, not me. I dont feel like oversimplifying just to prove MS was wrong. Sony was the one who broke the rule.
So it's wrong for me to speculate when the headline of a story and its contents contradict? I mean, at least I'm taking some time to try to understand the story. I read and analyzed the details I was given, and the conclusion I arrived at was that there isn't a complete story here. I mean if you're just going to assume that MS intentionally tried to leverage a monopoly it doesn't have (on video games, not os's) in a trade show that doesn't care much for it's entry, then I have a whole set of tabloids I'll be happy to send to you.
I seriously doubt anybody in the game community is paying any attention to CeBit looking for MS gossip. So it really makes little to no sense that they'd do anything that'd turn into a PR problem. Pardon me for applying logic to it instead of being cool and saying 'YYah!! I hate Microsoft!'
Cebit has every right to keep their show focused. If they don't want people playing games there, then by all means more power to them.
It really sucks when you pay extra attention to follow a rule, only to find that your enemy is not bound by that rule. Certainly you all can understand that point of view. It's like playing Q3. You're told you can't use the BFG, but some dumbshit does and nobody boots him for it. You'd bitch too!
Talk to the people who run CeBit, it's their rule, not MS or Sony's. If they don't want people playing games at their show, they have the right to say that.
I seriously doubt, though, that anybody's going to a trade show just to see if they want to buy a system that's been out a year and a half. That'd be like going to a car show to check out a 3 year old model.
"This is gamesmanship, pure and simple. And petty and smarmy."
I don't think so. If people are sitting at Sony's booth playing games instead of out checking out other booths, then Microsoft and everybody else at the show has a right to ask that the rules be enforced. I have no doubt there was some pettiness there, but I certainly don't blame MS for wanting things to be fair. (particularly when it could be MORE fair their way...)
Don't sit there and assume I'm defending MS here, I'm not. I'm saying there's more to the story than we're hearing. Both Slashdot and ZDNet have painted MS as the agressor, even though their writing suggests Sony turned the media in their favor. Gawd, the way you people attack MS you'd think they were OCP.
"MS does make games for the Xbox. Sony makes games for the PS2. If you like any of the games they make this does have bearing." -- Technically I said games I'd buy....
I agree that the XBOX sounds better at first, but not all the options are gettin weighed.
HDTV: GameCube supports progressive scan, but it cannot hit the higher resolutions that XBOX can. *But* if you take the XBOX to a higher resolution, it means a higher fill rate is needed. The performance cost may be on the substantial side. Ultimately the games matter, the resolution doesn't.
DD 5.1: I'm pretty sure the GC and PS2 support DD 5.1 or somethig like it. Unfortunately I'm not really familiar with it so I'm not going to push too hard on this. I do know that all 3 systems have good audio support.
XBOX HD: I'm not sure if this is a blessing or a curse. Although I agree it's great you don't need a memorycard out of the box, you are still paying $100 extra for this system. The problem is that the hard-drive is something extra to go wrong with the XBOX at this point. I agree, though, that this feature could make the XBOX the machine to own down the road, but today it's a glorified memory card.
Ethernet: I think you bring up a good point here. In some respects, I wish the GC did have a built in ethernet port. Here's the thing though, if a game comes out for the GC where ethernet is a must have, they'll almost certainly package it with the game like they did the rumble pack and memory exansion. This is no guarantee, but if Nintendo wants to do it, they will. They've proven that. Right now, support for the XBOX ethernet isn't that broad yet.
RAM: This may be a bit of a touchy issue. RAM doesn't automatically make a game better, but it makes the programmer's lives easier. As I said before, the graphics of the system are more heavily weighed by the artists than the hardware. It's my understanding that GC's RAM is a lot faster, so the difference may not be as big as it seems. I'm not a developer so I really cannot offer much insight there.
In short, $100 buys you more machine with the XBOX, I agree with you there. But the difference isn't that dramatic. At this point, it's the games that will determine the winner. XBOX has certainly looked more interesting lately than it has at launch. Maybe in a year I'll buy one. That depends on it having games I want to play, though. So far, the GC wins with me right now.
I agree. I've described MS as having no sportsmanship earlier. That seemed awfully petty. Can't say I'm terribly happy with Sony's reaction either. Oh well.
Playing a game and messing with apps on a laptop are not like comparing apples to apples. (the fruit, not the computer) Games have a goal to finish. "I need to kill all these guys to get to the next level." Demo kiosks, like you describe, are more like 'come see how pretty we are, listen to our sales pitch, and move on.'
You could make Laptops more engrossing, but you don't want to do that. In the case of a laptop, you want people to come in, learn about it, and go so more people can come in. Games are harder to do that with unless you have an employee demoing the highlights of the game.
The reason they left was so that MS'd look bad. And that's what happened. Slashdot, obviously biased against MS, posts an article saying 'MS kicks Sony out of CeBit', even though that isn't even close to what happened.
Complain about MS's business practices all you want, Sony certainly could have stood a little taller in this case.
Id really like to know what brought this to MS's attention. It's puzzling that MS would have one of it's own doors closed (i.e. letting people play XBOX's...) in order to stop Sony. I haven't ruled out that MS was just being a bastard, but you got to wonder what precipitated the complaint.
Nitpick nitpick nitpick. Their Playstations are gone, right? Their games are gone, right? Microsoft looks like the bad guy, particularly because the misleading headlines say 'Microsoft booted Sony', right?
Games can engross people when they're really there to listen to presentaitons. If Sony has a bunch of games to play, its not fair to the other exhibitors trying to sell actual products. CeBit doesn't strike me as the type of place to sell games, but rather to get the market informed on new products coming out. When you're fiddling with a Laptop, you're exploring what you can do with it so you can write a review of it later. It's not quite the same as killing time playing a game.
"What planet are you living on??? Microsoft chose to compete against Sony. That's why MS complained"
Well, if you oversimplify as situation, it does sonud like it'd happen that way, doesn't it? The thing is, if MS draws attention to a rule like that, it means that they cannot break it themselves. That would not work in their favor, if anything it'd draw attention to them. I bet there was a more significant reason that ZDNet hasn't reported.
In any case, I'm not going to let personal feelings about MS get in the way of my understanding what really happened. Do you 'Get it' now?
Though I agree about it being it being more powerful than PS2, the GC is harder to measure. The developer interviews i've read basically said that the GC is better at some things, and the XBOX is better at other things. At this point, it's the artists behind the systems that will provide better graphics.
Getting back on topic, this little episode has no bearing on my playing games on an XBOX or on Sony. Neither MS nor Sony make games for their systems that I want to buy. They simply provide the systems. Now if a game company threw a temper tantrum and left because they were caught breaking the rules, then I'd be cautious about buying games from them.
Hmm.. well we're all quick to shout 'MS sucks!' over this, but this story is seriously lacking in details. There's just enough of a hint that there's a larger story going on here, I'm not willing to play judge.
Why would MS complain about Sony unless they did something to provoke it? MS has employees demonstrating XBOX's, right? What if that was because MS read the rules and decided to bring a bunch of employees down to man the stations, only to find Sony stations unmanned so the public could play. I'd be mad about that. That means MS had to pay more people to come down.
What if Sony tried to complain about MS's booth being too loud, so MS fired a tit-for-tat shot back?
What if people were hovering around the Sony stations simply to play games, and they didn't want to go anywhere else because they couldn't play games? That means that Sony has an unfair advantage to attracting people.
We don't know enough about this story to pass judgement, so please reserve your karma whoring 'I hate MS!' posts for the time when actual facts arrive.
I agree. It's too bad Sony decided to just pack up and leave. What MS did was bad sportsmanship, what Sony did was try to elicit more support against MS. "Well, MS is whiny about us breaking rules, so we'll leave."
Sadly, ppl already hate MS enough that they'll use this as another attempt to bash MS and yadda yadda yadda. One guy posted "who'd by a game system from these people?" Well my response to that is "somebody who wants to play games."
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. Believing what the media says, no matter how little the source knows, oversimplifying, and not thinking about it all makes it a lot easier to believe that MS was just being evil.
By the way, you contradicted yourself. If that's such a great place to market the PS2, then just taking them away sounds foolish. Even a PS2 attract mode is better than no machine at all. "Well, the XBOX is here, where's Sony's PS2? I dunno, guess Sony doesn't think that highly of it." Sony was just trying to make MS look bad. What a bunch of babies.
... that a lot of ads in a theatre show a website? Particularly if you go to a theater with a slideshow in the beginning? I always thought it was kinda weird. How am I expected to jot down an URL unless it is for a movie itself? Is this a way of getting a little extra ad revenue?
If so, I'm not 100% sure it'd work. I wouldn't bring my laptop to a theater. I'm just not used to carrying anything into a theater. Still, being able to post my gripes about Rollerball on Slashot would have been worth bringing my laptop...
First off, PS2 wasn't kicked out of CeBit. Sony just pulled it out. All MS could do was have CeBit management say that PS2's have to be manned by Sony reps.
Secondly, I already explained why I'm thinking there's more to the store several times in this thread.
Here's a summary:
- It's not a games trade show. MS has nothing to gain by being the leader of the show. Nobody in the game reporting world is covering CeBit.
Go to IGN.com, for example. There is absolutely no mention of CeBit anywhere, especially in the XBOX or Sony section. You'd think that a story like that would make it there, but it didn't. Hmmm... do you quite possibly think that it's because that show has 0 bearing on the games industry?
That's why I don't think Microsoft was simply bullying at this show, there had to have been something that precipitated it.
"Also you completely ignore, that we might possibly have enough facts and it's just another instance of Microsoft bullying the competition."
Yeah yeah, whatever. Pardon me for actually putting an ounce of thought into it before saying "I believe everything the media says. We must obey. We must obey. We have no will of our own." Im a real bad person for this.
Gee. Poor you. Somebody in that company didn't make a very good move. Here in the real world, lots of companies trade RnD funding to Marketing funding and get a broader appeal. If an MS product doesn't work for you, find another solution . A sales pitch is not a gun being pointed to your head.
As for MS playing by the rules, I'm not defending the company as a whole. Im saying that we don't know the whole story of what happened. Everybody is drawing conclusions, likening this event to how MS does business, and I'm saying open your eyes and figure out what really happened. You could blindly assume that MS didn't like having competition at a trade show, or you could actually think about what happened and determine a more likely scenario. Face it, CeBit is not a game trade show. It's not worth trying to assert dominance there. It does 0% good, yet the probability of it backfiring on them is high. I think Sony did something to cause MS to complain. You have to remember that Sony is not much different from MS. They play hardball too. If they tried to play hardball with MS, it'd explain why MS would fight back. I can't believe anybody would read a story with such vague details in it and then draw conclusions on it. That is just DUMB.
I don't have any problem with you hating MS, particularly if they have screwed you. That doesn't mean that they're guilty of every little thing people accuse them of. Sony wasn't following the rules, and MS was. When the balance tipped in Sony's favor, MS complained. Netscape did this to MS, but nobody was mad at Netscape about it. The only real reason CeBit is an issue at all is that people hate MS.
As for MS costing money in the long run, in my company nearly everybody is running 2000 on their desktops with very little maintainence necessary, and most of the servers are running Linux. We made the decision that MS was the Desktop Solution, and Linux was the server solution. This is called an informed decision. We spend very little time/money to maintain them, and they all work reliably. We're not having to lay anybody off. Anybody managing by marketing documents really needs to go back to college. It's certainly not MS's fault.
All very good points. :)
Im curious about Max Payne for the GC, though. The hardware is far better on GC (and lots more RAM )than the PS2. I don't understand how they could port to PS2 and not the GC... Do you have a source of info on that? *Puzzled*
Considering the texture compression that GC has, plus the added RAM, what about the GC made it a problem?
On the PS2, they have to halve the verticle resolution just to have workable RAM to do stuff with...
Umm... okay. So every single person at MS (in the thousands...) acts like a Borg? Hating Microsoft is starting to shift from being cool to being absurd.
"MS had to pay more people'? No, MS would have chosen to, in contrast to Sony."
No, they had to. MS is under the watchful eye of everybody there. They have to follow the rules or everybody will hound them.
As for what's unfair about it? Have you ever been to a trade show? In any case, it's CeBit's rules, not MS's. If you have a problem, take it up with them. The way I see it, Sony shouldn't have been breaking the rules. Tough shit that they got caught
"I read this story yesterday - I wish I'd submitted it and reversed the Sony and MS roles. The feedback here would have been much different I'll bet."
Heh I doubt it. It probably wouldn't have bee accepted unless it was twisted as MS being at fault. People here don't understand that if you consistantly call a company guilty of something it didn't do, the somebody worse is gonna come along and make everybody wish MS was still around. All you have to do is be in conflict with MS, and you'll have support. You don't have to be better than them.
If you really narrow your perspective, you'll say things like "How's playing a game diffrent from fiddling witha laptop?" Obviously CeBit sees a difference and they made a rule about it. Ask them, not me. I dont feel like oversimplifying just to prove MS was wrong. Sony was the one who broke the rule.
So it's wrong for me to speculate when the headline of a story and its contents contradict? I mean, at least I'm taking some time to try to understand the story. I read and analyzed the details I was given, and the conclusion I arrived at was that there isn't a complete story here. I mean if you're just going to assume that MS intentionally tried to leverage a monopoly it doesn't have (on video games, not os's) in a trade show that doesn't care much for it's entry, then I have a whole set of tabloids I'll be happy to send to you.
I seriously doubt anybody in the game community is paying any attention to CeBit looking for MS gossip. So it really makes little to no sense that they'd do anything that'd turn into a PR problem. Pardon me for applying logic to it instead of being cool and saying 'YYah!! I hate Microsoft!'
Cebit has every right to keep their show focused. If they don't want people playing games there, then by all means more power to them.
It really sucks when you pay extra attention to follow a rule, only to find that your enemy is not bound by that rule. Certainly you all can understand that point of view. It's like playing Q3. You're told you can't use the BFG, but some dumbshit does and nobody boots him for it. You'd bitch too!
"Why would MS crush Netscape unless they did something to provoke it?"
Fighting with somebody in the market place vs. giving yourself bad press at a trade show aren't exactly apples to apples.
In any case, assuming Microsoft is always being evil is not a very good idea. You never know who the next industry king will be.
"Where's the conflict?"
Talk to the people who run CeBit, it's their rule, not MS or Sony's. If they don't want people playing games at their show, they have the right to say that.
I seriously doubt, though, that anybody's going to a trade show just to see if they want to buy a system that's been out a year and a half. That'd be like going to a car show to check out a 3 year old model.
"This is gamesmanship, pure and simple. And petty and smarmy."
I don't think so. If people are sitting at Sony's booth playing games instead of out checking out other booths, then Microsoft and everybody else at the show has a right to ask that the rules be enforced. I have no doubt there was some pettiness there, but I certainly don't blame MS for wanting things to be fair. (particularly when it could be MORE fair their way...)
Don't sit there and assume I'm defending MS here, I'm not. I'm saying there's more to the story than we're hearing. Both Slashdot and ZDNet have painted MS as the agressor, even though their writing suggests Sony turned the media in their favor. Gawd, the way you people attack MS you'd think they were OCP.
"MS does make games for the Xbox. Sony makes games for the PS2. If you like any of the games they make this does have bearing." -- Technically I said games I'd buy....
I agree that the XBOX sounds better at first, but not all the options are gettin weighed.
HDTV: GameCube supports progressive scan, but it cannot hit the higher resolutions that XBOX can. *But* if you take the XBOX to a higher resolution, it means a higher fill rate is needed. The performance cost may be on the substantial side. Ultimately the games matter, the resolution doesn't.
DD 5.1: I'm pretty sure the GC and PS2 support DD 5.1 or somethig like it. Unfortunately I'm not really familiar with it so I'm not going to push too hard on this. I do know that all 3 systems have good audio support.
XBOX HD: I'm not sure if this is a blessing or a curse. Although I agree it's great you don't need a memorycard out of the box, you are still paying $100 extra for this system. The problem is that the hard-drive is something extra to go wrong with the XBOX at this point. I agree, though, that this feature could make the XBOX the machine to own down the road, but today it's a glorified memory card.
Ethernet: I think you bring up a good point here. In some respects, I wish the GC did have a built in ethernet port. Here's the thing though, if a game comes out for the GC where ethernet is a must have, they'll almost certainly package it with the game like they did the rumble pack and memory exansion. This is no guarantee, but if Nintendo wants to do it, they will. They've proven that. Right now, support for the XBOX ethernet isn't that broad yet.
RAM: This may be a bit of a touchy issue. RAM doesn't automatically make a game better, but it makes the programmer's lives easier. As I said before, the graphics of the system are more heavily weighed by the artists than the hardware. It's my understanding that GC's RAM is a lot faster, so the difference may not be as big as it seems. I'm not a developer so I really cannot offer much insight there.
In short, $100 buys you more machine with the XBOX, I agree with you there. But the difference isn't that dramatic. At this point, it's the games that will determine the winner. XBOX has certainly looked more interesting lately than it has at launch. Maybe in a year I'll buy one. That depends on it having games I want to play, though. So far, the GC wins with me right now.
I agree. I've described MS as having no sportsmanship earlier. That seemed awfully petty. Can't say I'm terribly happy with Sony's reaction either. Oh well.
Playing a game and messing with apps on a laptop are not like comparing apples to apples. (the fruit, not the computer) Games have a goal to finish. "I need to kill all these guys to get to the next level." Demo kiosks, like you describe, are more like 'come see how pretty we are, listen to our sales pitch, and move on.'
You could make Laptops more engrossing, but you don't want to do that. In the case of a laptop, you want people to come in, learn about it, and go so more people can come in. Games are harder to do that with unless you have an employee demoing the highlights of the game.
The reason they left was so that MS'd look bad. And that's what happened. Slashdot, obviously biased against MS, posts an article saying 'MS kicks Sony out of CeBit', even though that isn't even close to what happened.
Complain about MS's business practices all you want, Sony certainly could have stood a little taller in this case.
Id really like to know what brought this to MS's attention. It's puzzling that MS would have one of it's own doors closed (i.e. letting people play XBOX's...) in order to stop Sony. I haven't ruled out that MS was just being a bastard, but you got to wonder what precipitated the complaint.
Nitpick nitpick nitpick. Their Playstations are gone, right? Their games are gone, right? Microsoft looks like the bad guy, particularly because the misleading headlines say 'Microsoft booted Sony', right?
My point still stands.
"Yet more proof that people just don't understand what /. is all about...."
Heh I think this is proof that I do understand it...
Games can engross people when they're really there to listen to presentaitons. If Sony has a bunch of games to play, its not fair to the other exhibitors trying to sell actual products. CeBit doesn't strike me as the type of place to sell games, but rather to get the market informed on new products coming out. When you're fiddling with a Laptop, you're exploring what you can do with it so you can write a review of it later. It's not quite the same as killing time playing a game.
"What planet are you living on??? Microsoft chose to compete against Sony. That's why MS complained"
Well, if you oversimplify as situation, it does sonud like it'd happen that way, doesn't it? The thing is, if MS draws attention to a rule like that, it means that they cannot break it themselves. That would not work in their favor, if anything it'd draw attention to them. I bet there was a more significant reason that ZDNet hasn't reported.
In any case, I'm not going to let personal feelings about MS get in the way of my understanding what really happened. Do you 'Get it' now?
Though I agree about it being it being more powerful than PS2, the GC is harder to measure. The developer interviews i've read basically said that the GC is better at some things, and the XBOX is better at other things. At this point, it's the artists behind the systems that will provide better graphics.
Getting back on topic, this little episode has no bearing on my playing games on an XBOX or on Sony. Neither MS nor Sony make games for their systems that I want to buy. They simply provide the systems. Now if a game company threw a temper tantrum and left because they were caught breaking the rules, then I'd be cautious about buying games from them.
Hmm.. well we're all quick to shout 'MS sucks!' over this, but this story is seriously lacking in details. There's just enough of a hint that there's a larger story going on here, I'm not willing to play judge.
Why would MS complain about Sony unless they did something to provoke it? MS has employees demonstrating XBOX's, right? What if that was because MS read the rules and decided to bring a bunch of employees down to man the stations, only to find Sony stations unmanned so the public could play. I'd be mad about that. That means MS had to pay more people to come down.
What if Sony tried to complain about MS's booth being too loud, so MS fired a tit-for-tat shot back?
What if people were hovering around the Sony stations simply to play games, and they didn't want to go anywhere else because they couldn't play games? That means that Sony has an unfair advantage to attracting people.
We don't know enough about this story to pass judgement, so please reserve your karma whoring 'I hate MS!' posts for the time when actual facts arrive.
I agree. It's too bad Sony decided to just pack up and leave. What MS did was bad sportsmanship, what Sony did was try to elicit more support against MS. "Well, MS is whiny about us breaking rules, so we'll leave."
Sadly, ppl already hate MS enough that they'll use this as another attempt to bash MS and yadda yadda yadda. One guy posted "who'd by a game system from these people?" Well my response to that is "somebody who wants to play games."