A good reason to dislike Sony (Gaming)

by Vortech , A Fourth Wheel, Saturday, December 09, 2017, 08:27 (2327 days ago) @ Korny

Honestly, if the exclusives or PS+ games aren't getting you to play the PS4 or upgrade to the Pro, then that's entirely on you, and not a result of their crossplay decisions, I think. It's clearly not hurting them any, so no, they'll likely never reverse that decision. I just think the Xbox fanboys should stop being salty about it, because it's a good business decision to keep the Xbox playerbase out of its cookie jar.

It's kind of hard to tell when you are just trollin' — especially when it comes to console wars — but since you keep saying this, I fell like I should point out there is a business justification for them going cross platform even though they have a larger installed base right now. Several, in fact.

1. "For now" — Like you posted, this used to be MS with the lead that they were trying to protect with a walled garden, and you don't need to look very far back to see how things can flip. The Walled garden does not keep people in or guarantee that your lead won't dramatically flip in less than the course of a few months.

2. Looking like the good guys is important. — Generating goodwill DOES keep people on the platform. Another phrase for "Console Zealot" is "Loyal Customer". A lot of people bought an XBONE despite having a higher price and worse performance. It didn't "win the war", but it did save the platform and give MS time to make adjustments to strategy and eventually hardware. A lot of that was born on the back of goodwill from popular and likely unprofitable ideas like backward compatibility, etc.
Especially dangerous is the fact that this is not only making them look like the bad guys, but it is making the developers look like the good guys. If your fear is people discovering that their game play can be portable between platforms, you sure as hell don't want to shift people's platform loyalty to developer loyalty. Developers only make games for consoles because they don't think they could sell enough units on PC/iOS where the development restrictions are way lighter, you don't need to submit for (as extensive) review and there is no console maker to take a cut of every unit with a platform tax. This leads to…

3. Gillette does not want to sell more handles. — Playstation is not in the business of selling consoles, they are in the business of taking fees for games sold to play on their consoles. They lose money on consoles. They should be doing everything they can to convince people who bought their console to buy and play games online (which requires PS+ Subscriptions). Having more potential people to play with is a thing that can do that.

4. You lose 2-front wars by pretending they are 1-front wars — This is similar to #2, but slightly different. The danger is not just losing people to X Box, the danger is fairly real from he PC front. Enabling cross play with PC is just as much of a risk, as once people all have stem accounts enabled, that steambox suddenly becomes a much more likely competitor.

You can argue that these don't sum up to more than the cost/risk — obviously someone at Sony has — but the reasons to support it exist.