Ah, darn. The TR reboot was such a wonderful surprise. When I started it, I was disappointed about how shooty it was, as opposed to being a puzzle/exploration game. It wore off pretty quickly. The bow was glorious. So much more engaging (IMHO, natch) than Bioshock Infinite which turned out to be a mechanical snoozefest with neat levels.
I played TR on PC, and own a PS4, but guess I’m going to miss this one. That sucks.
If Sony had locked up the exclusive, I wonder how many people bitching right now would be high-fiving and going “SUCK IT, MS!” Microsoft did what console makers do in a console war.
I think it’s from Juenet’s Micmacs.
Except Sony to my knowledge hasn’t done it this gen and so far MS has done it twice.
Why would they though? Sony is winning. These kinds of measures aren’t necessary for them.
Sony have never really gone down that road. Sony’s approach is to build value by investing in and publishing exclusive games. It’s an addative philosophy, one that has paid dividends over the long term.
Microsoft is more apt to take a subtractive approach. They find a game already being made and pay for it not to come out on the competing platform, or for it, or its DLC to come later. In that situation Xbox owners don’t gain anything. It’s just hundreds of millions of dollars across a generation being paid to withhold content from PlayStation fans. That’s hundreds of millions of dollars that could have been spent building new, original, exclusive experiences.
If they had to anticipate a completely crazy number of sales to break even, you’re saying that isn’t a management problem?
It’s exactly what it is.
I keep thinking I’m clicking on the Tomb Raider thread but it brings me to the Console Wars thread. I think my browser is screwy.
<joking>
I don’t have a current gen console and have no plans for one so this doesn’t affect me, other than missing a possible pc port.
I think the truly harmful part of such an agreement are the restrictions put on speech, much more than the restrictions put on actions. It effectively forces CD and SE to equivocate and deliberately mislead their fans on other platforms about their development plans. If they could just openly state the period of exclusivity, the damage to their image would be minimal, testing only the fans’ patience, but not their trust.
Openly state the period of exclusivity? That would kind of defeat the point for the agreement holder. They want that exclusivity to entice buyers to their platform.
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All right folks, show’s over, the next Tomb Raider game is confirmed to have a timed exclusivity on Xbox. Somebody find me something new to hyperventilate over.
Microsoft started their whole Xbox franchise with it by “stealing” Halo from MAC / PC.
That’s why I want Microsoft to exit the videogames market rather today than tomorrow!
All they can is disrupt and destroy.
At least Sony creates with their own internal studios and 3rd parties they bind from the start to themselves.
The full interview wording is full of shitspeak, treating customers like idiots.
“Obviously the deal does have a duration.”
Obviously we were all idiots for thinking it may have after your carefully scripted and repeated language from the announcement and lack of clarification.
The rest is just handballed to SE as it is not his place to comment.
That might be fair enough, but I think both companies have handled this poorly, but maybe that was the plan, to get millions and millions of hits across the internet for a day or so, rather than just a ‘meh’ announcement about a short term timed exclusive. We are probably witnessing carefully orchestrated marketing. Now we sit back and discuss and chatter for another 24 hours until SE chimes in with news of the length of the timed duration. More hits. More publicity.
I figured it had to be timed, but it doesn’t help that they just didn’t say it in the first place. The internets were on fire most of yesterday regarding their poor wording.
It certainly didn’t help that Darrell Gallagher’s post was written in a way that implied the game would never come to PS4 or PC, instead offering the isometric game and the “Definitive Edition” of the last game as substitutes.
Who says they have to scale anything back? For all anyone knows it was just completely mismanaged and the budget exploded when it didn’t have to.
Again, that just highlights what a bunch of jackasses Microsoft is lately, by using mealy-mouthed wording that was needlessly deceptive for no constructive reason. They consistently just seem clueless about how to treat their customers and potential customers - they’re more than indifferent to the desires of consumers - they’re condescending, obfuscating, disingenuous, and just annoying.
Yeah, I don’t really see the point with all the coyness talking about this yesterday when they just came out today and said, “but of course it’s just for a while!” Probably a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing which, I can tell you from experience, is not exactly uncommon at Microsoft.
“Obviously there is a duration, it would have cost us a lot more to stop them from ever releasing on the console that is outselling ours by 2 to 1.” - Microsoft