Network effects. (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Tuesday, March 15, 2016, 01:07 (3270 days ago) @ unoudid

Is this a push from Microsoft as a way to continue to move towards combining the PC and XBone? Is this cross-platform support really a way to weaken their gaming console in favor of having a broader gaming dominance with games being on windows and xbox? Not sure if this makes sense. But mainly wondering if this plays into a 10-year plan instead of just a 2-year plan.

I think they're admitting they've lost the installed base war for this generation.

Imagine, for example, a world where the PS4 outsold the Xbone 10:1, and everybody plays Destiny. There are 1 million Xbox-owning Destiny players, but 10 million on PS4.

Privately, MS approaches Sony about cross-platform play. Sony sees that this benefits MS more than it does Sony. With the smaller installed base, Destiny on the Xbox will take longer to do matchmaking, and will support fewer active playlists. There's also the chance that people will leave the platform for the PS4 to gain access to the playerbase, thus making the problem worse.

Adding 1M Xbox players to the pool of Destiny players on Sony's platform won't benefit that platform as much as adding 10M Sony players to the pool of Xbox players would, so Sony declines to allow cross-platform play.

Of course, this example assumes that the gap between the platforms is large, and that each platform owner both knows, and is willing to admit publicly, what the relationship is. If the gap is only a few million and not an order of magnitude, then it's likely the underdog only considers it a matter of time before they are in the lead, so in this case, neither side wants cross-platform play. Neither side wants to be seen as seeking it, because it can be interpreted as admission of a weaker position.

Promoting cross-play between PS4 and Windows, for instance, would be an obvious tactic by Sony. It means the Sony playerbase actually gets augmented by players on a Microsoft owned platform from which Microsoft draws no benefit, since they get a cut of game sales on Xbox but don't on Windows, and don't control that platform the way they do the Xbox.

I've actually seen similar effects in different industries. In the late 90s /early 2000s, the first two GSM mobile operators launched in Kazakhstan. At that time, both were part owned by Turkish mobile operators that were competitors in their home market, and were engaged in a proxy war here. Voice calls (by legislative requirement) between the two operators passed through the national wireline operator at a high tariff (so all three would get a cut). That made those calls expensive. Calls in-network were the cheapest, and operators would practically give those minutes away in order to attract users. (They still do this today.)

The sticking point was text messaging (SMS). Neither operator would seek or grant permission for text messages to flow between the two operators. With expensive internetwork calls and no internetwork SMS, many people carried two phones. (I did for several years.) Allowing subscribers to a competitors network to access subscribers on your network via SMS would mean that users could drop one of their two phones, and everyone was afraid of being the one that got dropped.