Game Stooge

FEATURE: Sony’s Lost Exclusives

• Scribbled on July 18th, 2008 by Jonathon Howard
• Filed in Blu-Ray/HD-DVD, Editorial Content, Features, Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation 3

Sony’s tyranny of the purse strings is starting to hurt. Hurt them, their console, and most all their customers who have purchased their console. This has become especially apparent this week at E3, where time and time again Sony’s inability to spend when it needs to spend has cost it face and even more damaging, customers.

Let’s go through them then shall we? The biggest and the one that people are still talking about, and will continue to talk about for a long time is Square-Enix’s announcement that Final Fantasy XIII will be coming to the Xbox 360 at the same time it comes out for Playstation 3, despite Sony owning 9% of Square-Enix. FFXIII joins a growing list of games that were originally announced as PS3 exclusives that ended up coming to the 360 as well: Grand Theft Auto IV, Devil May Cry 4, Assassin’s Creed, Virtua Fighter 5, Beautiful Katamari, and Fatal Inertia. The only game that Sony’s managed to keep exclusive is Metal Gear Solid 4, and even that is up in the air now, too.

Sony could have kept all of these exclusive to their console if they had just opened up their wallet and made it worthwhile for the developers. Video game development costs have skyrocketed in the last two console cycles. Developers are spending around $100 million dollars per game, and in order to recoup those costs they need to sell a lot of games or get funding to make up for the loss of sales by restricting their game to a single console. Sony seems unwilling, while Microsoft is more than happy to, and we’re seeing the results.

Another problem is that Sony has been unable to deliver on the promise of its console. PS3 was launched with the promise that Home would soon be coming to the console, that was two years ago! There is still no Home. In fact, Sony’s Jack Tretton has called the program “in No Man’s Land”! Talk about giving the press a field day! Microsoft has already shifted its focus with Live ,and will be rolling it out this fall, delivering on many of the promises Sony made about Home, things like Avatars, watching movies and playing games with friends across the world, and creating a virtual meeting place for gamers! Sony is still not able to tell us when Home will be here – and region locking it, which Microsoft is not. Spending a little more money on development and securing usage rights to music and movies for Home could have delivered this product to console owners over a year ago, but again they haven’t been willing to.

Why? Why is Sony doing this? The hardware in the PS3 is ridiculously expensive! Sony has lost and lost and lost money on the console, and they’re trying to get some of that back by making the thing profitable. Sadly, they’re trying to do it by not spending any more money, but in today’s development atmosphere where money is made porting your game to as many systems as possible, you’re going to be hard pressed to move PS3 when the 360 is cheaper and there are no noticeable perks to owning a PS3 over an Xbox, aside from having a Blu-Ray player. Is there still time for Sony to make a comeback or have they already lost the console war?