So let me preface this with the question that started off this week: "Is Sony anti-consumer?" The answer of course is yes but I will add my usual qualifier that the answer comes with a lot of caveats. About 110 million of them in fact. While Sony may seem anti-consumer to anyone who doesn't own a PS4 or has any intentions of buying a Playstation of any generation to those of us that do we're happy as clams. There is also the fact that, although unconfirmed as of this writing the exclusive in question is only going to be for a limited time. The current speculation is six months after which that particular content will be available to anyone on any platform.
So why am I being so vague? Because there's a lot more going on under this same question. Not only can you ask is Sony anti-consumer but the same question can be asked about Microsoft and Apple when it comes to iCloud and Game Pass. Point of fact you can add the same qualifiers about iCloud and XCloud that you can about Spiderman and the Avengers. In both cases each company is trying to do what's best for it's own consumers but the cost comes out of the rest of the gaming community as a whole. And to borrow a phrase, that's the point.
Pretty much every corporation in the world is anti-consumer. Their number one goal is to make a profit so that they can continue to operate. Money from consumers gets turned around into R&D and that creates innovation which gives us newer and better shit to hand them more money for. At least that's how it's supposed to work. I will grant you that increasingly, especially here in America a larger and larger share of those profits goes into the pockets of greedy mother fuckers that never earned them but I digress. In order for these corporations to earn our hard earned cash they have to give us something no one else can. There are a number of ways to do this but in the video game world those ways are shrinking. Pretty much any game nowadays has to be made cross platform or built with the expectation of cross play in order to turn a profit. This is good for players but bad for publishers and hardware makers. In order for them to level the playing field we see things like timed exclusives and prohibitive restrictions on proprietary storefronts Game devs, like game players are as much consumers as they are creatives and as a result are caught in the middle. Like players they have to fork over their own hard in cash in the form of surrendering a percentage of profits from sales. This entices devs to spread their wares across as many platforms as possible so that the corresponding increase in sales overcomes the loss from having to profit share. Publishers, of course have a single base from which to pull from and if there is little to no incentive for gamers to stay loyal to a singular brand that's not good news for publishers.
So now that you understand the scope of the problem hopefully you have a better understanding of why Sony, Microsoft and Apple and acting in the ways that they are. From Apple's perspective another brand muscling in on their turf makes it more difficult for them to provide their consumer base the same kinds of products and services that earned them that base to begin with. For Microsoft, it's do or die time. Unable to compete mano-e-mano with Sony and Nintendo in the traditional gamespace they need to change the rules if the XBox brand is going to survive. And for Sony the same is true with Playstation. Their entire business model is built on making high powered, big budget AAA exclusives and as that business model approaches extinction it's adapt or die. But unlike their larger competitors Sony simply doesn't have the resources to change as radically as Microsoft or Apple over the same time frame. For Sony change is coming but it is necessarily slow as the risks are immeasurable. Despite my rantings in my last blog about how Sony needs to catch up this latest announcement is some evidence that they are attempting to do just that. Normally by now we'd be getting these kinds of announcements about entire third party games, not just DLC packs. I expect Sony to continue to make those kinds of ancillary deals as more and more of their first party content gets ported to other storefronts. I'm also expecting a big announcement about PS Now after the PS5 finally launches.
So as the console wars heat up and consumers are increasingly hyped we must also be measured in our responses to what's coming. While Microsoft is trying to change how we play games Sony and Apple are pushing back for good reasons. Maybe Microsoft's bet that cloud gaming is the way to go will pay off but maybe it won't. We've already seen a high powered failure in Google Stadia and Google has WAY more resources than Microsoft ever had. The coming years are going to be very interesting and unfortunately, very anti-consumer. As much as it pains me to say this it's something we're just going to have to accept.