EA Wants Balance Between Sony and Microsoft

[Atrocious Joystick]

My only fear with Sony getting near monopoly position in the console industry is that Sony seems to be much hornier for exclusives. I'm mainly a PC gamer but it seems like most games released for the Xbox 360 are released for all three big systems (xbox, ps, windows) while it seems like a lot of solid games stay on the Playstation (inFamous, the last of us,etc).

Right now a developer could tell Sony to fuck right off they tried to make them choose between releasing on windows or on the playstation. If they have a near monopoly position they would have a much stronger case. Not saying they would cut off all games from the PC but they might want to hog a lot more AAA games. Which would be bad for the PC and retailers like steam.

 

[thebobmaster_v1legacy]

I find it funny how many people here oppose monopolies or near-monopolies, yet support Steam.

Anyways, what he says makes sense. Were his motivations behind saying it pro-consumer? Maybe not, but the simple fact is that no CEO speak is pro-consumer. Sure, they may claim it is, and in some cases, do a great job in dressing it up. But in the end, every company is pro-making money. That's the way it is. You think Steam has sales simply out of the kindness of Gabe Newell's heart? No. They realized sales make more money, because people buy the games. And hey, Valve gets a cut out of every game sold, so more game sales=more money.

Don't get me wrong. EA is definitely in need of business speak school (and economy school period). But saying "Of course EA would say that! They profit if Microsoft holds their own! They are wrong!" is falling into the trap of "Ad Hominem". Monopolies are bad, no matter who has control, and the fact that EA is saying it doesn't make that wrong.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

The industry does need competition, of course. However, at the moment Microsoft aren't holding up their side. They've announced an exhorbitantly priced box that records our living rooms 24/7, reserves the right to take our games away at a moments notice, prevents lending or reselling legally purchased games and the only innovation they offer is for "television" and not "games" which is the main duty of a console.

Sony OTOH said they are prioritising games and allow consumers to do as they wish with their purchased games. There is no competition, Sony rocked E3 and MS have some serious thinking to do.

The PS3 was the lagger last gen because it came out too late and cost too much. Sony aren't repeating either of those mistakes and further, seem to have even endeavoured to provide a resonable launch line up. No there is no competition here, Sony have a superior, consumer-friendly product at a lower price. If I do buy next gen, it'll be PS4, unless the homebrew scene makes its home elsewhere or MS seriously rethink their console.

PS. I wonder how retailers will take all this. Like in the Beta/VHS days when retailers decided the war, will Game/Gamestop choose to stock more PS4 titles/hardware as they can be traded in and therefore represent more profit?

PPS. Also, screw EA I almost went a whole post without saying that. Though they dropped Project $10, they still have a long ways to go before they even come close to being tolerable.

PPPS. Anyone spending £430 on a console is a moron. A (budget) gaming PC can be built for that, with two decades worth of games on-tap from the get go, not to mention emulators playing generations of console games, CD/DVD burning, proper web browser, full video format support for media playback and not to mention access to the hard drive for trading saves, using mods, cheats and what not.

 

[Infernal Lawyer]

What a moron.

'Competition' is a little more complicated than simply having two or more people battling it out. Imagine a boxing match in which neither man bothered training or doing anything other than frontal jabs.

It's about trying to one-up your opponent, thinking of things that will encourage customers to come to you rather than your opponent. Anyway, EA already knows the nastier version of competing: Simply buying up all the competition it can, which is ironically all about creating a monopoly. I refuse to believe that he honestly thinks that competition for the sake of competition is a good idea.

Anyway, it's already been said here: EA put all of it's eggs into the Microsoft basket and now it's sore; there's no point in trying to keep the competition running when one side keeps shooting itself in the foot, etc. etc.

 

[ClockworkSailor]

I agree with what EA says on the face of the matter, competition is a good, nay, great thing. But I just can't shake the feeling I get watching the Twilight Zone, that feeling that no matter what is presented it is subverted by an undercurrent of wrongness.

Also I can't get over how much EA sounds like a villain character from an Ayn Rand novel. I feel as if they want us to support Mircosoft BECAUSE they done goofed and its our duty to maintain Microsoft as a console developer. I would like to give MS the benefit of the doubt and say they are horribly misguided and a bit stupid, but this whole affair just stinks of evil to the point not even Hanlon's Razor is covering for MS

 

[EstrogenicMuscle]

"Don't give up on Microsoft we like their DRM and..-

Oh.

And here I was ready to do the usual EA bashing but this I really do agree with. Customers never benefit from one company having a monopoly on things. It is why Intel's Haswell isn't so impressive as it could be. AMD haven't been able to give Intel the competition that would benefit us consumers.

That being said, I'm sure there are plenty of people ready and willing to give Sony competition. I don't think we need Microsoft to have a healthy console war going. Nintendo already has a chance of doing pretty well, to be honest. Valve also seems poised to enter the race. Now the Microsoft has failed, Valve's Piston could take up the torch.

And if the Ouya is any indication. Lots of people want to jump head-first into the console market right now. Whether or not they can succeed. I'm willing to be we're not starved for competition just yet.

 

[Josh123914]

Come on everyone, I think you're being really hard on Mr Moore here.
I mean he does bring up valid arguments for why competition is good. I mean remember back in 2007 when he said that they'd support the PS3 and 360 evenly?

Oh wait.
This has probably been said a bajillion times now but EA has put its exclusivity eggs in the microsoft basket, and now that they see the basket is being burned by the weave holding it together (24 hour checks, kinect among a few) EA is trying to on one end show that the Xbone isn't bad while with the other attempting to rebuild its bridge with Sony and un-fuck over Nintendo PR-wise.
I mean I bet that EA abolished project 10 dollar because they figured the PS4 would adopt MS' policies too, and they burned the Nintendo bridge because Nintendo already stood up to them (see: EA trying to force NN into the Origin framework) but after Sony saw the complete shitstorm microsoft raised they went Nope.avi and went for a free console.

Besides, this is EA after all. Considering everything they say and do has an ulterior motive behind it that usually culminates in fucking me over somehow for no good reason I'd take whatever he says with a salt mine.

Paraphrasing the OP: ''I'm EA. We just realised that the Xbone just lost this generation. Please buy our games on whichever console you please. Don't worry about that exclusive stuff, it'll be sold as DLC later on anyway. Oh, and don't forget to buy those games we're developing for the WiiU. Oh Wait.''

 

[sXeth]

Yeah, he's clearly a keeper upper on the industry.

There's only that Wii-U thing, the Ouya thing (technically anyhow), Valve's rumored box, PCs, the barrage of tablets, and what all else that provides competition. Even if the Xbone plummets off a cliff, MS themselves have said they're intending to keep 360 afloat for 3-5 years amidst their confusion. Heck, EA itself could conceivably field a console, in theory.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

Sony wasn't the lagger. It had a slow start and eventually overcame the Xbox 360. At the conclusion of this generation, in terms of sales, the results are: 1st place: Wii, 2nd place: PS3, 3rd place: Xbox 360. Add to this the fact that the 360 is a year older than the PS3 and that the extraordinarily high failure rate of the 360 for the first half of its life, in my opinion, the PS3 handedly defeated the 360. For this next generation, Microsoft's defeat is just coming a bit sooner.

Ok, a LOT sooner.

EDIT: source: http://www.vgchartz.com/

Sony outsold MS in Japan by orders of magnitude, but in the West there was little competition. Wii was cheaper and released first, plus the new, previously-untapped "casuals" market that flocked to the motion controlled white box put it way out front, but Sony weren't even a close third in the West. Further, every console they sold actually cost them money as they were sold at a loss. The PS3 might be competitive with the 360 now, but it was overpriced and too late to the party at launch and it never closed that deficit.

 

[Carrots_macduff]

yeah right, the only balance ea cares about is their bank balance

but seriously, didnt microsoft announce some sort of exclusivity partnership with ea?
i guess i shouldn't expect consistency from the likes of these.

 

[DarkhoIlow]

And now that both X1 and PS4 have the same architecture I expect more PC ports than before of console games. We are probably going to get alienated again because the consoles are more powerful, yeah I thought as much but time will tell.

You can't have balance while "console wars" still exist.

 

[FieryTrainwreck]

I can't stand this fallacy.

We don't need two boxers if one of them is constantly spitting into the crowd.

Bad ideas need to fail. They shouldn't be propped up out of some misguided understanding of "competition".

EA wants both consoles to succeed because publishers will make more money per unit sold on Xbone. That's what these anti-consumer policies are all about. When this happens, and publisher support shifts to favor Microsoft, Sony will lose market share and eventually adopt similar anti-consumer policies. EA wants these features to become standard, so of course they want MS to triumph. They just can't say this outright, so they go with the "competition is always good dur" play.

 

[Lightknight]

There's nothing that says Microsoft has to be the one competing. They are not entitled to be that group. What we're seeing here is the benefit of competition. Microsoft does something really bad and the competition did not. The is the entire point of competition, that the people who compete well benefit while the companies that step out of line are punished.

Microsoft now has to drag their tattered ass back to the drawing board and become competitive again instead of shooting themselves in the foot again. They gambled big that the customer wasn't smart enough and hopefully they're losing that gamble.

Or, and this is more likely, they'll do ok this round anyways despite all this nonsense and just lose some market share.

There is another alternative, of course. They can acknowledge their mistakes and make changes before launch. Showing that they know they're wrong can get them even bigger points than being right in the first place. But as is, they're really taking hits when they say that they knew that there'd be a backlash but that customers don't stick with the details in the end.

As for EA being the one saying that, no duh. Of course they want the console that offers always online drm to them on a platter to do well.