OptimalPrime said:
GTA IV, Assassin's Creed, and LA Noire all had the chance to be PS3 exlcusives but Sony let those chances slip away. Its lucky to have so many inhouse developers or the PS3 truly would be a console with a few exclusives. If you are a PS3 owner, would you want to pay for a "premium" PSN if it meant getting more exclusives? it seems sony does not wanna pay for exclusivity unlike its competitor microsoft.
EDIT: By premium i mean paying a yearly subscription of say $40-70 to get earlier access to PSN content. Online play should still be free.
You have to look at the big picture here.
Sony is in an interesting position because they just fought a massive battle to win the HD format war, and make Blu-Ray the industry standard. This took a lot of time and money, and involved doing things like paying off Hollywood directors and such to give endorsements.
That expense, combined with manufacturing and releasing the players, has been one of the big problems with the PS-3, since the PS-3 has always been playing tug of war with the develeopment of Blu-Ray players due to shared components. Considering that a PS-3 costs less than some stand alone Blu-Ray machines they also feel they lose more money than they say by manufacturing the PS-3.
Simply put Sony decided it wanted to try and dominate the video technology front, rather than dominating the game front.
While Microsoft is branching into other things, consider that it doesn't have as many balls in the air as Sony does. Sony is pretty much THE evil 1980s Japanacorp, the one that inspired a lot of that Cyberpunk stuff. Despite public claims of their size, nobody knows all the pies Sony has it's fingers in except Sony, but even at a global level it can only operate on a world-wide scale in so many areas at once.
You also have to consider there is the whole East-West thing going on, and right now a lot of people are unhappy with an Eastern super-corp controlling the video/information storage format of the moment, and so we're seeing a much bigger push than usual to see the generation AFTER HD/Blu-Ray released in hopes of killing Sony's stranglehold before it becomes to entrenched.
Compared to that battle, the whole "exclusive titles" thing is absolutly petty despite a couple billion dollars being involved yearly. Sony could have stopped a 360 Final Fantasy XIII release if it wanted to (I believe they still hold substantial amounts of Square-Enix stock) but that isn't what they are focused on.
See, as gamers we tend to look at the console war as "the" war for Sony, but Sony isn't focused on game consoles specifically, they are an electronics company. I think the console war is a much "bigger" front for Microsoft or Nintendo as it makes up a higher proportion of their overall business than it is for Sony.
I suspect one way or another we will see another era of massive battles for "exclusive" titles, I just think other events have caused it to miss a generation. A decade or so down the road if we're all still on The Escapist we'll be listening to people who grew up with this generation of consoles screaming "Oh Noes, what is with all this exclusive games BS. Back when I used to play the overwhelming majority of games could be played on both systems".
-
While not a Sony fanboy (quite the opposite on a lot of levels), I will again say, I think Sony is one of the closet things to an actual "evil corperate empire" on Earth. Despite what their books might say publically I actually think Sony is more powerful than Microsoft (operating systems aside) by a couple of magnitudes. They have their fingers into just about everything, including their own movie and music studios. What's more if some hints are correct about what is going to happen to Microsoft due to legal wrangling and tech changes, this "era" might be their last hurrah as a major power, which is in part why I think they are trying to diversify so much and so focused (comparitively) on their console. I think the 360 means more to Microsoft right now than the PS-3 means to Sony. In the big picture Sony can afford to take a hit (more or less) on a console generation, especially if it means gaining more in the long run. If Sony manages to keep Blu Ray as the standard, and blocks it being replaced immediatly, consider all the ducks in a row that gives them... now just for consoles, but also for movies, electronic manufacturing, and music... all of which are businesses they are into. They will control both media production AND the format/hardware used for it.
Honestly, I'd really kind of like to see someone stop them. I am probably not articulating this as well as I could, but I rapidly see Sony getting into a position similar to (but differant) the one Ted Turner tried to create for himself before the goverment intervened. East Vs. West aside, I don't think anyone should be allowed to get that powerful. Arguably I think Sony is rapidly becoming worse than what Microsoft was before they got a legal/govermental sledgehammer taken to them. I think the global community as a whole should start looking at some of these corperations more closely, and Sony is one of the biggest ones to watch.
Agree or disagree, this is my opinion/observations.
