A stupid reason to not buy PS4 (Gaming)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Friday, December 08, 2017, 13:51 (2543 days ago) @ EffortlessFury
edited by Korny, Friday, December 08, 2017, 14:06

How is caring more about the platform than the hardware a "bad thing?" Microsoft's trying to make it easier to play games, they just want you to play on their OS, essentially.

I mean, they could do both, yeah. But as we've already seen with Destiny 2's hitches on Xbox, it feels like they're starting to put Xbone players to the wayside in favor of PC, which has the far larger install base. Sure, Play Anywhere is great if you have a PC, but odds are the folks who have a PC that can play the games aren't likely to buy an Xbone when they can snag all of the "exclusives". It just hurts the Xbone-only playerbase.

I mean, it sounds like you're defending exclusivity? Last I checked, that was something we all universally hated?

Nooooo. I think exclusivity is great. I'm very much pro-competition, and exclusives kind of force competitors to improve and deliver better products. If everyone has the same things, what incentives are there for them to improve, or to retain their own markets? Monopolies invariably mean a weaker product, less innovation, and ultimately less user choice (sure, there's far more stuff to choose from, but how much of that is crap?).

I mean, yeah, I want everyone to experience something like The Last of Us or HZD, but I don't know if they'd be as good as they are if SIE didn't have a direct incentive to make sure that these games were as polished as they could be (both TLoU and HZD were delayed multiple times).

The lack of competition is what led to stuff like EA Sports, or the annual CoD release, where only minor changes have been made between releases (Treyarch aside).
I mean, even amongst its own platform. Look at the MCC. It was a mess, but rather than fixing it, Microsoft decided to sweep that version under the rug as quickly as it could in order to build hype for Halo 5, and only now, three years later, they announce that they're finally getting around to fixing it. Where was the direct competition that would have pushed 343 towards innovation? Where is the need to make sure that MS continues to deliver better, polished exclusives? I mean, a lot of people hated Halo 4, but at least that was a result of 343 knowing that (and reacting to the fact that) Call of Duty was direct competition.
What's weird is that Microsoft used to know this for their console, but then they cancelled Project Spark, then they killed off Fable, and just when it looked like Xbox would have their own answer to Horizon Zero Dawn, they killed off Scalebound. I can all but guarantee that Halo 6 will be on PC, and since it will have splitscreen, I worry about what the base Xbox owners will have to deal with.

What incentive will Microsoft have to ensure that the people who have a base Xbone get treated as a priority for games? As it stands, best case scenario is that the base Xbone will just be a more expensive Playstation with far less games. The Xbone X will be nothing but a gilded cage for the people who don't realize that they could get a far more versatile PC that would have far more games, but they'll say "boy, look at these NATIVE FOUR KAY GRAFIX"!

Ultimately, exclusivity is great for the market, and the fact that Microsoft has pretty much given up on it for the Xbox is proof, since there are a lot of unique experiences that will no longer see the light of day.

I don't think Sony should throw anyone a bone, but when every platform is now cross-platform capable except PS4, the amount of players on every other platform other than PS4 is much larger than PS4's install base.

The PS4 has supported cross-platform play with PC since launch. Microsoft only somewhat recently decided to start supporting it (remember that Halo Wars 1-2 didn't support crossplay, even between different PC versions), and they decided to make a big deal about it. Sure, the excuse that Sony gave for not supporting it between consoles was dumb, but people act as though Sony is keeping all of the balls to itself and going home. As it stands, the real winners of cross-plat play are the PC players, since their platform doesn't compete directly with either Sony or Microsoft, and nowadays they have been getting more games that used to be exclusive to Xbox.
If anything, I hope that remaining closed-off will force Sony to improve on their exclusives, to avoid the stagnation and arrogance that comes with being on top. If the bad PR that comes from not playing ball with Microsoft forces them to put more effort in their games, or to snag better timed exclusives, then I'm all for it.

So yeah, I'm not against exclusives, for good reason.