Speculation is one thing, cheering and praying for it (which happened here) is another.
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Ah yes, the misaligned argument that company size and market cap somehow directly correlates with market position and market share within an industry. The biggest companies definitely can't feel the pressure of anti-competitive practices by entrenched market leaders.
Just do better Microsoft, you aren't swimming upriver fast enough.
Makes sense, got it.
Though the ABK purchase will close this gap eventually.
How does speculating about future acquisitions = belief that acquisitions are the only way to compete?
IMO it's always going come off as cheering if your fav brand is Xbox. You would want them to buy your fav studios.
Blaming your competitor for your failures is not a good excuse. Make a compelling product and the market will take care of itself or brute force your way. It might work. Just don't understand this notion that MS's position is Sonys fault which completely overlooks the failures and missteps of themselves. Sony has a better product it's really that simple. Ms can always improve and they will but the excuses made for them are tiring.
Nor is it an excuse Microsoft solely makes, let's not make reductive points that aren't fully considerate of the actual business circumstances that make this a smart move for Microsoft's overall gaming strategy.
If Sonys product is better why do they need to pay to keep FF, Silent Hill and other products off or Xbox. Why the exclusives quest lines and exclusion of Game Pass clauses if people would buy the PlayStation version regardless? These games are sold world wide.
It's capitalizing on Sony's mistake during this whole regulatory process. Sony tried so hard to block this deal they may have inadvertently made any future publisher acquisitions more difficult for themselves.
At the same time it's also opening them up to what would normally be a ridiculous notion (Japan/Congress thing)
I never said that, I said to take a look into those threads.
As I said in my previous post that you quoted, both things can be true at the same time. Sony can be deserving of its place in the market because they offer a great product AND Sony can possibly be blamed for anti-competitive practices because they may have made moves that hurt its competition. It isn't an excuse for the numerous documented mistakes and failures of Xbox after the 360 era but it shouldn't be brushed aside either just because Microsoft made mistakes.
MS could 100% corner the market on JRPG's and the Xbox would still struggle mightily in Japan. They just don't want a high end home gaming console in large numbers there anymore. Especially an American one that focuses mostly on western games.
I don't think there's anything Xbox could do in Japan to make significant headway. "Just make something better" is laughably reductive. Xbox has a MASSIVE cultural barrier in Japan, not just a software barrier.
Yeah I don't buy that shit at all because they still do to this day. There are a ton of games on Gamepass that were timed exclusives and there was no scrutiny. This is solely because people don't like that Sony is doing it and that's all. It has nothing to do with scrutiny. That is just so dishonest.
Just wanted to add here that I am not being hostile towards you so excuse my language lol.
Completely disagree. Sony is not more reliant on these practices. Microsoft did the exact same thing in the 360 era with Sony and the argument wasn't entirely that they relied on them. That was purely the nature of Sony's mishaps with the PS3 launch and Microsoft FAIRLY capitalizing on that mishap. Bad messaging, hard to program for, awful price, all lead to Sony being beat out the gate with the 360. Terrible online, no party system, getting hacked. All of that was on Sony. Microsoft won that.
Microsoft ends up doing the exact same mishap, Sony capitalized on that and now we have an issue? It's not adding up to me.
What is a consumer-friendly version of timed exclusives? There is no such thing IMO because who is this really satisfying? If a timed exclusive is something that prevents you from playing the game on the system of your choosing, it's not consumer friendly period and no one is going to convince me that taking away something regardless of how you personally feel about the game is somehow "friendly". Adding arbitrary language such as "needing to know the time" changes nothing because there are a lot of timed exclusives announced on both sides that had the times very much stated and people were still upset.
Again, this really comes down to Sony doing it, that the only story I see between these fake lines of people trying to sound neutral on the grounds that they don't want to sound as if they have some sort of bias to one thing or another. Lots of arguments about this have been disingenuous at best and clapping for Microsoft to now acquire full publishers that don't even adhere to a concept of a timed exclusive because they will flat-out be an exclusive is very wild to me.
The point is, timed exclusives have been a thing since the beginning of gaming and the purpose was always to beat the competition at being the first. Now squeezing the argument into something that determines whether or not it causes anti-competition when the entire thing has been a very strong competitive practice is so corny. What's the point of buying a studio? What's the point of renting studios to create games for your system? Aren't these all forms of competition?
Please don't take this comment at me arguing with you specifically. I don't mean it to come off that way and I'm actually being really chill. I'm just generally commenting on the idea that there is room for some sort of silver lining in all of this when I just don't buy that.
Maybe I'm just a dunce but what exactly is this exclusivity that Sony is pushing that is blocking Microsoft from competing in Japan? From my limited knowledge, the only real studios that Sony has worked with (and has been for years even before an Xbox was a thing) are Capcom, Square, and Sega/Atlus (after transitioning to a publisher)
With the many studios that exist in Japan and over 90% of them working exclusively with Nintendo more than Sony, what hard example of this blocking do we have that Sony is doing to Microsoft? What specific titles are exclusive to Sony that Microsoft can't compete with? because the only example people continue to pull out their backs is Final Fantasy which again, has never been closely aligned with Xbox and Street FIghter which also was not. Same for Persona, and same for Resident Evil etc. Mass Effect wasn't closely aligned with Sony. Neither was the Elder Scrolls series. Neither was the DOOM. COD and Madden wasn't either shockingly.
Sony is not a JRPG machine in Japan nor America either and after all these talks about Sony not investing in Japan and leaving it to die, I am so thoroughly surprised that all of a sudden, the non-existing, non-competitive Sony Japan and now blocking things. Where is this coming from?
Both things can be true, in that it is MS's fault they got to this point but also Sony is being incredibly aggressive, and possibly anti-competetive with timed exclusives with don't allow them to compete as well.
The reverse was true in the 360/PS3 era funny enough, with MS in Sony's position and Sony in MS's position (except with no one buying publishers). Time repeats itself.
The exclusivity deals Microsoft does with gamepass are not year plus in length like Sony does. You're talking a couple of months vs 360+ days.
Sony has had deals for a couple of months too and Microsoft has had them for a year length as well that were not exclusive to Gamepass. Let's stop acting like 2020 is the first time Microsoft has done a timed exclusive.
Tinfoil hat time:
Obviously MS is using the full force of their lobbying efforts to invalidate any Sony/Capcom "No Gamepass" contract for when they acquire them.
All joking aside, I wonder what the pie in the sky endgame is here, no more marketing exclusives? What about co-development deals? Or situations where smaller devs just don't have the resources? Perhaps caps on term?
Obviously MS is using the full force of their lobbying efforts to invalidate any Sony/Capcom "No Gamepass" contract for when they acquire them.
All joking aside, I wonder what the pie in the sky endgame is here, no more marketing exclusives? What about co-development deals? Or situations where smaller devs just don't have the resources? Perhaps caps on term?
I honestly think this is just because Microsoft wants to buy a Japanese publisher and is making the case easier. Of course they don't want to get rid of third-party exclusives or marketing deals, they still do it; maybe not as much as Sony, but they still have them.
Have MS made any 1 year or even permanent exclusives with third party's in recent years? Ones that they don't own now, that is. I cant actually remember so I'm curious.
Making a 3-6 month Game Pass deal is a bit different than what Sony does with FF.
Battle.net has such prestige now as a solid and competent launcher. It would be silly for Microsoft not to make B.NET its primarily distribution for PC Game Pass going forward. So I agree. Wonder what they call it, "Battle.Net powered by Game Pass"?
This is being said as if for the life of FF, Sony has had year exclusives. FF7 Re is the ONLY game Sony has ever had an exclusive with. Why is this argument being brought up as some practice they've had for every single game?
Dead Rising was exclusive to Microsoft for Years before it finally hit PlayStation. Also Mass Effect.
I think the 360 era is pretty definitive for Xbox outsider status in the industry. Basically, Sony shot themselves in the foot with the PS3, the 360 was a better product and cheaper, Xbox even had the marketing deals that counted and in the end, the PS3 caught the 360 and surpassed it worldwide (while it was pretty close in the Anglophone countries, the Xbox traditional markets)
I am a bit more forgiving in hindsight for the Xbox One/Kinect debacle because the Kinect sold really well, the Wii had stormed out of the gate and it did seem that Xbox trying to compete with Sony in regular console terms always had a bit of inevitability to it; i am less forgiving of the TV TV TV stuff lol but I for one do not think that had the Xbox One just been like the PS4, that we would have seen any further marketshare increase for the Xbox
To be fair, Dead Rising and the first Mass Effect were published by Microsoft.
Not that I really care about money if corporations and whatnot but it does seem like an expensive endeavor if every other country approved it and they make it drag on for that much longer.
Of course they have. Also not sure why you are saying the Gamepass deals are different they are still timed exclusive.
Wouldn't it be fair to say that Microsoft helped those games lift off the ground so by right those games should be exclusive?
In short, I think you need to learn to dispel the notion that because one competitor does something in a market, it's equivalent to another competitor doing the same. We have rules to protect against monopolies, because the simple fact is that once in a dominant position, actions that previously make sense to be competitive become anticompetitive when used to target smaller players in a market.
We can talk about all the mistakes MS' competitors made over the years in the OS market leading to Windows being dominant. Good job, well done Microsoft, you now have the overwhelmingly dominant product. However, now that means Microsoft simply is not allowed to do many things with Windows that a smaller player like say Valve is absolutely allowed to do with SteamOS. Because certain actions will make SteamOS more competitive, but the same actions by Windows would simply be to stamp SteamOS out of existence.
Hopefully this helps you understand why something like signing exclusivity deals can increase competition in the market for one player when they have a marginal market position, but can lessen competition when a dominant player is using them to target their smaller competition.
There is no "one size fits all" rule that works by removing the context of the disparity of marketshare and market power between competitors. At some point a dominant player has to be reeled in, because the nature of capitalism makes it easier to pull away the further ahead you are. Capitalism basically relies on a blue shell existing to protect consumers against there only being a single viable option.
That's what I'm getting at. Correct me if I'm wrong here, FF7 Remake is developed and published by Square Enix so PlayStation is paying for exclusivity. I don't think it's a direct comparison to Dead Rising and Mass Effect since they fall under first party (at the time) for Microsoft. Mass Effect finally made it to PlayStation after BioWare was bought by EA.
You told me to "look below" and also to look in other threads. There's no prevailing narrative that acquisition is the only way for MS to remain competitive.
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You don't know the difference between a 3-6 month exclusive vs longer than a year exclusive?
It's not the same thing, one thing you can wait for, the other can pretty much be forgotten unless it one day goes to gamepass.
I disagree.
ANYTHING and I mean ANYTHING can change the landscape of market share that has nothing to do with someone's dominant position. See Google and the current rise of ChatGPT. Acting as if, regulating one competitor over the other because the other one feels like the other isn't being fair because they have personally lost their way is now bullshit IMO (non hostile language here).
Tencent and Embracer threaten everyone's position but it's not like Microsoft is pointing to them stopping them from competing. They use them as their argument to acquire. But use Sony as solely the reason they can't catch up because Sony is just too good at forging better relationships.
Microsoft isn't small and knows what it means to be dominant and they know that upping the anti to making sure they make the right investments to keep their position is actually the strategy that is needed. They've lost many times with Bing and made the investment to compete.
Them now making this petty argument with Sony is dishonest because they are trying to swing at them for a tactic that they know is fair given their own market position in another market, but hoping that gullible people will latch on to the absurdity of it all.
I can't believe people can't see this...
It's always amusing to watch how badly people mis-interpret things. Like we actually live in some Utopia where "just make the best product and you will win" is a real thing and just ignores over 100 years in the US of larger players using their monopoly power to supress other players in the field. People make their entire career over debating and litigating this.......but now we know they should just make a better product.....
MS has made tons of mis-steps, and a lot of their struggles are their own fault. But to somehow pretend that "just making a better product" solves this issue is lunacy.
FF7 is the only game with such an uncertain exclusivity. The rest have all been clear cut like the ones yall are talking about. Also MS is sticking to 3-6 month because they are launching them in Gamepass which is way more expensive then just a marketing deal or exclusivity.
I have to do my research so I admit I may be talking out of text here, but I remember FF7 Remake being something that Square directly worked with Sony on, as in Sony put money into the project not to just make it an exclusive but to give them the tools to make it faster than they were originally scoped out to be. Of course, those tools were to make it better on PlayStation but considering they invested in the project, I don't see the issue here.
Sony was ready to invest in Starfield and Microsoft came in and instead took the whole pie. Now Sony is left gagged because they weren't expecting that. Microsoft isn't wrong for doing it, but the intention here is to completely remove period.
Sony not buying Square still leaves a game that Xbox users are still anticipating, to come to the Xbox....So I need to understand now.....What is the issue? Time is not a valid excuse to me.
And then we get on to the current subject....So fine, Sony has one single game with Square that had an ambiguous timed exclusitivty window and now we should look at how Sony uses it's dominant position in Japan to block Microsoft....Ok....
So...what's the end game here? That because of this, Microsoft should be able to waltz right into Japan and buy Square, Capcom, Sega etc etc because Sony was oh so aggressive in keeping FF that now they must feel! the consequences of their actions?
All these conversations do is expose that people don't want parity. They still underneath it all, and want the other competitor to have their way no matter how forceful because of "market position".
I don't think just making a better product is the solution, we've seen the 360 and PS3 gen where Microsoft had the more compelling product compared to Sony's $600 machine for many years and Sony's console was missing key titles yet Sony's console still outsold the 360 each year it was on the market. If simply making a better product actually worked the PS3 would have sold substantially less than the 360.
This reads like a genki tweet A
And B there's a difference in market forces on an acquisition deal and regulators and all that and what this is which is A TRADE DISPUTE. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here
This isn't about ABK at all it is about an interpretation of a trade agreement the USA and Japan signed in 2019 and some US politicians arguing companies in their home states are not being effectively protected by the terms of that trade deal
One hand isn't working with the other here, the government is walking and chewing gum
Those were both new IP and BioWare was independent at time. Also all these examples of Xbox being just as bad PS were 15+ years ago. Ghostwire Tokyo still isn't on Xbox. I'm positive if the acquisition didn't happen, those games may never have come to Xbox.
People really do forget that a lot of PS3's sales came from regions Xbox was either not available in or wasn't a more compelling product due to lack of Xbox Live whereas PSN was available there.
The new mainline final fantasy I'm sure will be the next uncertain one.
KOTOR, will probably be another. Forspoken? Another, I believe the exclusivity on that one is even longer.
These are big budget games compared to these exclusive indies gamepass gets.
TBF KOTOR is kinda in limbo considering they essentially had to hard restart iirc
The lead designer on KOTOR already publicly stated it is a timed exclusive. It is coming to Xbox. Forspoken was announced as a 2 year exclusive. The only reason it wouldn't come to Xbox is if it was a such a sales failure that SE doesn't want to pay for the port and MS doesn't care to either.
Not sure I would call Stalker 2, ARK2, and Darktide small indie exclusives since they will probably sale more then FFVII and FFXVI.
Aren't you the one arguing based on feeling?
Marketshare is a key component of market analysis and one of several key metrics regulators look at when taking enforcement actions.
Market leaders stamping out competition by entering into deals that deny other market participants from accessing the inputs needed to successfully operate is one of the main reason anti-trust laws exist.
So, as "disingenuous" as the argument is that Sony imposed lack of access is meaningfully contributing to Xbox' woes in Japan, the practice of paying companies to deny Xbox access is quite literally anti-competitive behavior- especially if one subscribes to the market definitions that Sony has pushed.
Forspoken Sony paid for. Rightfully they should be able to have exclusivity on that alone or are we now changing the rules on this?
KOTOR is an assumption.
Wait wait wait, people stated that they wanted better communication and transparency around timed exclusives so Square has already said and perfectly communicated why Xbox is going to get the game later....or is that not enough?
Stop changing the "type" of game because the argument is bad faith. If timed exclusives are BAD, then ALL GAMES regardless of budget, AAA down to indies, are BAD too.
A timed exclusive is a timed exclusive regardless of how you feel about said game. One does not make the other okay. Be consistent yall.
Let's stop making exceptions for things that we are 100% passionate about, that needs to stop on a whole, to keep things consumer friendly.
I gave you an example regarding Windows. That was picked specifically because I do know that Microsoft has had and wielded an unassailable market advantage against smaller competitors in the past. And by smaller I specifically mean within their market segment, so Apple is still smaller for desktop OS, even if bigger than MS overall.
With the logic you're employing, it should be fair game for MS to consistently take actions to thwart the likes of SteamOS, or MacOS, or ChromeOS etc, because if MS was making deals that suppressed them, it would just be Valve etc being "in their feels" to complain, because they're not so good at at forging "better relationships".
Antitrust law doesn't give a shit quite frankly if you feel Sony now deserves to lead the console market until the end of time because they made good choices once upon a time. A dominant market player is not treated the same as a marginal one, in any competitive industry, ever. And they shouldn't be... because that sort of naive idealistic view of "fair" destroys competition and harms us as users. Martket dominance cascades. There's nothing "gullible" about realising and acknowledging that, even when it applies to your favored brand.
Regarding the exclusion of Game Pass Clauses,
Its worth noting that those are part of the marketing deals (As it was with re8) i kinda think it makes sense to add a clause like that when you are already paying to promote a game on your plataform, otherwise you would be basically be promoting a competing service.
Whether console-holders should have marketing rights for big third-party games is a different matter, though
Are we really going to argue that Sony is the sole market leader. I thought everyone in here has spent months laughing at the FTC trying to cut out Nintendo. Nintendo is probably the leading console at the moment and actually gets more Japanese exclusives the Sony.