Nintendo and Microsoft team up to promote cross-play, while Sony remains silent
theverge.com
theverge.com
It's actually because logging in to a Fortnite account on PS4 irreversibly locks that account to Sony's walled garden.
I created my Fortnite account on PC and played there. Then I logged in on PS4, and played there. Now when I try to log in on Switch, I'm not able to. Here's the actual error message given:
"This Fortnite account is associated with a platform which does not allow it to operate on Switch. Neither the Fortnite website nor Epic Customer Service are able to change this. To play Fortnite on Switch, please create a new account."
The problem is that even disassociating the account from Sony won't then allow me to use my Fortnite account outside of Sony's walled garden. The account is permanently tainted by PlayStation.
Most importantly, the irreversibility of Sony's taint upon your account isn't disclosed until after the fact. It's a classic anti-user misdeed.
Anyway, Hacker News seems like the right place to ponder SaaSS user account foibles.
I have lost any kind of trust in Sony. After the massive hacks, shitty anti-customer attitude and now locking the Fortnite accounts, I will never buy another Sony product in the future.
All of these companies have had pretty shitty, anti-customer attitudes. Microsoft popularized pay-for-online services with Xbox Gold and now it's standard to have to pay a monthly fee to play your console games online. Conservely, crossplay would be the standard now is Microsoft has jumped on board when Sony was supporting it last generation. Nintendo hasn't been able to maintain a reasonable level of presense-across-device, creating a massive headache when changing devises or getting a new console and having to repurchase things you shouldn't have to. I can't really see the justification for not buying a Sony product but continuing to support Xbox or Nintendo given all of their attitudes over the years.
I get the whole 'dominant position' argument. It just seems dumb to me to behave like this when you're in a dominant position. Seems that big corporations learn the same lesson over and over again - in the meantime customers are left holding the bag.
BTW, full disclosure: I'm a Nintendo Switch fanboi, so take everything that comes out of my keyboard with a pinch of salt.
In most other companies, like Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, etc., if you buy a title, you can play it on any platform that supports it. The fact that Nintendo players can't accumulate a library of legacy Nintendo titles and play them on any Nintendo console they port it to demonstrates Nintendo has a strong interest in repackaging and reselling the same games over and over again.
Gamespy and Steam's multiplayer system already did that for free.
> a lot of benefits were realized including centralizing your multiplayer experience (community and content)
Again, same thing.
> not having to maintain multiple subscriptions for different game services
I never needed to ever, except for MMOs, which I was still required to pay for on XBL at the time.
> That is and was worth the premium
No it wasn't, the fact you had to play multiplayer hosted on your own console, hosted on your own internet connection, by software you already bought is ridiculous. They offered "free updates", community features and other services completely free. But, multiplayer, the only thing most of us wanted and none of this "value add", you had to pay.
Because Sony doesn't support proper cross play, among many other reasons they are out.
You haven't really looked at app platforms before, have you. If you buy evernote on IOS, you're sure not getting it on android.
MS is being friendly to it because they're behind. In the Xbox 360/PS3 days, it was Sony asking to do cross-play and Microsoft denying it. Its a PR play, and you're buying it.
Hmm, so I wonder what the cause of the controversy really is.
It's actually because logging in to a Fortnite account on PS4 irreversibly locks that account to Sony's walled garden.
Oh, so it is Sony.
Regardless of how Sony went about the cause I don't see how you can make a distinction regarding the effect.
Having worked on federated login with Sony, I suspect this "account taint" behavior is because Epic is using Sony's payment platform for loot crates. It's against Sony's policy to be able to pay for things to be used outside their ecosystem...mostly because that opens up a whole can of legal worms. It's for the same reason Spotify subscriptions use in-app purchase but you put your credit card into Uber and Lyft. Allowing cross-play means the in-game items you paid for with loot crates should transfer.
Aha, HN devs say, why don't you just carry a bit with those items that were paid for and hide them on other platforms? This is, more or less, how Blizzard deals with this. However, if that's not how you set it up out of the gate, that can be a painful thing to do retroactively. That's why I feel it's a bit disingenuous to heap ALL the hate on Sony. Epic could possibly work around this.
That said, everything about the account is cosmetic-related. You'll have to start all over getting your John Wick skin...but how big of a deal is that really? It doesn't affect gameplay. That's probably what Epic is thinking.
But you can't. It would not only cost money to, but it is also time gated, and once that gate closes you can't open it back up. No new account can have a John Wick skin because it requires buying something no longer for sale and then completing challenges that are no longer part of the game.
But Sony's response says "We also offer Fortnite cross-play support with PC, Mac, iOS, and Android devices". It seems like consoles in their target market are specifically excluded for portability here.
> It's against Sony's policy to be able to pay for things to be used outside their ecosystem...mostly because that opens up a whole can of legal worms. I can purchase skins on PC and use them on PS4. So that blows up the legal argument.
This feels like a weird distortion because its gaming related. For example Apple allows their users to bring kindle books purchased outside their platform even though they didn't get a 30% cut of sales. We would be roasting Apple right now if they were locking it down like Sony is.
They also don't allow you to purchase books within their ecosystem. On PC, you're using Epic's payment platform. Same way you can pay for your kindle books on the web in Amazon's ecosystem and then read them on an iPad.
My point is that weird technical and legal hurdles, when followed lazily, can lead to anti-consumer practices. I don't think it's deflecting from the issue to discuss the underlying technical and legal constraints. It's Hacker News. If you want to rage against Sony for not allowing cross-play go to Polygon.
I don't see how this is different from Xbox/iOS/PC/Switch all sharing digital purchases. Sony is the only platform that has "legal hurdles" preventing this?
> My point is that weird technical and legal hurdles
I don't think their are any technical challenges unless you insist digital licenses must be sandboxed. Epic has accidentally removed the technical blocks previously.
> It's Hacker News. If you want to rage against Sony for not allowing cross-play go to Polygon.
I'm sorry if it feels like I'm raging but I strongly believe users need to fight for fair digital licensing. Sandboxing purchases feels like a fine technical workaround but I'd prefer platform owners change policy to match users expectations.
Not all companies "move fast and break things" in legal matters. We don't know the full circumstances, but Sony may have evaluated the landscape and decided the liabilities weren't worth the potential profits, while Nintendo and Microsoft looked at the landscape and decided that the profits exceeded the liabilities in this case.
It's for the same reason that you find Wells Fargo or Facebook committing transgressions that other banks or social media sites may avoid.
Apple will absolutely let you purchase ebooks within their ecosystem. But if you are selling other people's books, that 30% is likely your entire margin.
Ironically, you can buy real books too, without giving apple a cut (except their portion for the CC tx fees from the bank for Apple Pay)
While you might not agree with the other poster, this REALLY isn't the way civil people debate. Don't do this.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2509396/mobile-apps/am...
https://www.theverge.com/2013/7/30/4572170/amazon-finds-clev...
http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/24/technology/gadgets/kindle-ap...
You can buy items in the game on the PC play it on multiple platforms but as soon as you log into the game on a PS4 the account will be locked to that system as far as consoles go.
There is no warnning, there is no way to reverse this and they essentially lock you out out of your own account.
Apple wanted a cut that Amazon didn’t want to give but they didn’t not block you from using the Kindle app on an iPhone nor did they locked out the books from being accessible on other platforms once you’ve opened them on your phone.
Not even Apple is that stupid.
Also even if Apple did block books purchased outside of their platform that would still would not be comparable as they did not forcibly locked you out of content you’ve already owned on all other platforms.
I would be Ok if Sony and Epic made a deal that items purchased from the PSN store would be unavailable else where but locking your account because you logged in even once and didn’t play the game or even bought an item is just bullshit.
I should add to this that this isn’t even only Fortnite as this is on the Epic account level so if you played previous Epic games on your PS4 your account is locked out by default.
A friend of mine had his Fortnite account locked out because they played the Paragon beta on their PS4 like 2 years ago. They don’t even own a PS4 anymore and never played Fortnite on it.
For one, the solution should be keeping two different V-Buck wallets: one for Sony, and another for everyone else, legal issue solved, moving on. So, because it's not happening, there must be something we're missing here...
My understanding, having not played Fortnite:
* Some skins (like John Wick) are time-limited and purchase-limited and achievement-limited. In other words you have to purchase the Battle Pass for a given season and complete all the challenges before the time runs out. John Wick skins are past that window, nothing can be done about them now.
* Other skins are just time and money limited. I'm told that you can log in and there will be only a single skin for sale.
But really, discussing whether it's a big deal[0] is missing what's important here. Neither Sony nor Epic adequately warned players that this would happen. That's the meat of the issue right there.
Again, I've not played Fortnite, only seen it in the Epic launcher when I dust off Unreal Engine 4.
[0]: Do I really need to say it is a big deal that players who poured money into their account are now being told to start from scratch?
I think Epic should pull a power move while they have the most popular game in the world and pull it from Sony with no notice.
As you said they were quite annoyed that an account that they’ve spent a lot of time and also money on is now essentially locked out and irreversibly so without any warning or consent.
Why are accounts linked to a console at all? That has nothing to do with cross-play...
As for why accounts are linked to a console, linking your account means you can have the same friend list across platforms, which makes it easier to play with your friends no matter where you're playing. Also, and maybe more importantly, you have access to all of your cosmetics across platforms.
http://www.businessinsider.com/fortnite-nintendo-switch-ps4-...
Its shitty but the ball is in their court.
Not that I appreciate their way too (supposedly the anti-piracy / console-locking measures in Switch are first grade?) but this would put pressure on Sony to possibly stop blocking cross-play.
Sony is thinking short term - "If we open up on Fortnite, we'll sell less content now through our digital store". So no one at Sony is willing to fight for this. It won't make any charts go up for the next quarterly earnings.
But the long-term view is that they are teaching an entire new generation of gamers that "Playstation is the worst place to play Fortnite - the world's most popular game". That is going to be a disaster the next time new consoles are released - just like how Microsoft made similarly dumb moves when they first launched the XBox One.
If we assume PS4 is not the dominant platform then your assertions might be true, however if PS4 is the dominant platform then they're absurd.
Sony is teaching the same lesson as Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, Atari. It's best to buy the same console as your friends.
Of course that's not to say that any mobile user who dips into a free-to-play game has the same long term customer value as a hardcore console player so I'm not sure how that math works out. But it's worth keeping in mind that the player base of any console is dwarfed by phone users and that's a funnel of millions of new gamers who see the PS4 as the only platform that "sucks for Fortnite". I think that could have long term market effects.
Rephrased: The good thing about dinosaurs is that they go extinct. Imagine 1500s humans living with dinosaurs. Humans would be extinct.
So let Ms, Sony and any other dinosaur keep shooting themselves in the foot.
In the long term, neither console maker wants cross-platform support. They want to create a situation where everyone has to have both the Sony device and the Microsoft device. That's an equilibrium that both companies are happy with. Pure cross-platform play ends in consumers not needing both devices and hence total sales will drop.
When the "pendulum swings" and Xbox has a dominant generation, expect Microsoft to reject cross-platform play.
But I totally agree that Microsoft would be doing exactly the same stuff if they happened to be the market leader.
Companies change all the time, though. The next head of XBoX could go back to the Mattrick days and completely burn all the good will they have. But, as long as Phil and Nadella are around, I don't think they'll be blocking cross-play anytime soon, even if they do become the dominant platform.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/final-fantasy-14-director-...
"One of the issues Yoshida noted, however, was that many companies don't consider how updates to the way online services are operated and regulated can impact an MMORPG.
"Those can become a hurdle when we consider operating FFXIV for an extended period of time," he said. "So when I talk to those first-party companies, I ask them, 'Do you have the capability to prepare for that, do you have the resolve that you're going to make sure to take responsibility and take care of those, do you have that willingness?'
"If we are able to come to some sort of agreement, a handshake so to speak, or if it does end up being that unfortunately we can't do a handshake with Final Fantasy XIV, either way we'll make sure to communicate with our players. But we have been tenacious--we've been trying to keep at it and be persistent about our conversations.""
Considering that cross-play between Microsoft, Nintendo, and PC is supported for multiple games now (Rocket League, Minecraft, and Fortnite), I think it's safe to say that Sony's the one holding back cross-play as a whole. As in to say, even if the above issues were fixed, I wouldn't be surprised if Sony said no anyway.
Microsoft had 360-PC cross-play in a very small number of games (under the now much maligned Games for Windows Live banner and DRM regime), such as Shadowrun (FPS). Microsoft wanted some consistency in the network stack, and GfWL was a part of that attempt.
Apparently Trion when building Defiance (MMO related to TV show) asked both Sony and Microsoft for cross-play (and technically demoed it), but was rebuked by Microsoft's "network experience" concerns, which at the time were at least somewhat valid, particularly compared to what Microsoft was trying to do with Xbox Live and GfWL.
A couple titles (one of the FF MMOs, 14 was it?) just built in cross-play between 360/PS3, didn't ask, didn't really advertise it, and mostly were successful and not shut down.
On the one hand, Microsoft downplayed cross-play with Sony in the 360 generation for fear of "filthy non-paying gamers with no proper user accounts" ruining the Xbox Live experience, but on the other hand Microsoft was very excited for cross-play as an opportunity on Windows.
Microsoft's change in stance here on cross-play over the two generations could be entirely attributed to lessons learned from GfWL's failures, and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with dominant position on console one way or the other. A lot of Microsoft's current excitement about cross-play doesn't look that different than from the 360/GfWL era, beyond, of course, branding changes (Microsoft Store, Xbox Live (on Windows)) and some relaxation/evolution on network accounts and DRM/anti-cheating (for instance, Xbox Live on Windows is "free" now, Gold status is no longer required for PC multiplayer; Microsoft Store is little bit of a friendlier DRM regime than GfWL at its worst; etc).
To be honest that is why a few friends and myself got PS4s. We had quite a few friends on the platform and I already had an xbox, but I wanted to play with them so I got a PS4.
What's interesting is that you can cross play with PC and Mobile on PS4 though. It sounds like they just don't want to work with Microsoft or Nintendo.
If you look at the global sales, then yes, the PS4 is stomping the Xbox One into oblivion at the moment. If you look at the US sales, the difference between them is much smaller [1]. If Sony enables crossplay, they will probably lose a lot of sales to Microsoft in the US because they lack the overwhelming popularity that they have in Japan and other markets.
This article [2] shows just how poorly the Xbox sells in Japan - the week the Xbox One X launched, only 1,639 were sold. Only 49 units of the less powerful Xbox One S were sold. For comparison, almost 30,000 PS4 and PS4 Pros were sold. Even the PS Vita beat out the Xbox, with around 3,000 sold.
[1] http://www.vgchartz.com/article/271063/ps4-vs-xbox-one-vs-sw...
[2] https://kotaku.com/here-are-the-xbox-one-xs-japanese-sellout...
Annoucing this cross-play is a cheap win-win for both MS and Nintendo: For Nintendo, it solidifies that in the right context, the ultraportable Switch is a comparable platform to the cabinet-bound boxy consoles that are still current in their generation -- a marketing victory that handily exceeds the reputation of its predecessor, the Wii U. For Microsoft, it legitimizes their cross-play message by spreading beyond platforms that they both happened to own, and makes Sony look bad.
[1] https://kotaku.com/epic-accidentally-allows-xbox-and-ps4-cro...
1. Because it gets people on their system, who will then buy more games when the fad does eventually die out (which let's be clear won't be anytime soon). If someone playing Fortnite on PC asks their XBoX friends to download and play with them, now a bridge has been formed between the Fortnite only PC player and the XBoX player. It's only a few conversations away from "Hey, I got a 4K TV, let me get an XBoX so that I can keep playing Fortnite and all these other games with my friends."
2. Because it garners good will. Within the last few years, more and more companies are realizing that doing good by the consumer can still be profitable. Sony's the dominant platform now, but that can change within a year. If Microsoft is over here saying that their games are going to be backwards compatible forever and the consumer knows, through history, that Microsoft allows you to play with your friends no matter where they play, that's a substantial incentive to get the next XBoX over the next Playstation.
3. Because, and this is the simplest reason, why not? The work is already done, all Epic has to do is flip the switch. It requires no extra work on Sony's end, just willingness to allow their console to talk to other consoles. The way this is going, this is going to be net profit negative in the long run, with more people jumping to XBoX if they know Microsoft plays well with others.
You will be able to create a new in-game gamertag; it will require re-adding friends but I’m really excited to be able to finally play remotely with my friends!
the data subject shall have the right to have the personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible.
Cross-play is a different story though.
> We’re always open to hearing what the PlayStation community is interested in to enhance their gaming experience. Fortnite is already a huge hit with PS4 fans, offering a true free-to-play experience so gamers can jump in and play online. With 79 million PS4s sold around the world and more than 80 million monthly active users on PlayStation Network, we’ve built a huge community of gamers who can play together on Fortnite and all online titles. We also offer Fortnite cross-play support with PC, Mac, iOS, and Android devices, expanding the opportunity for Fortnite fans on PS4 to play with even more gamers on other platforms.[1]
Microsoft had the exact same stance when they had the 360 while Sony on the struggling PS3 wanted cross play.
Proprietary standards hamper adoption and success. Many try to be Apple but only one can end up pulling it off.
And as if that wasn’t bad enough, data is typically really expensive (time-wise at the very least) to create. It takes years to build up gaming history, social network points, comment histories and bookmarks, etc. Instead of that being irrevocably yours, instead you’re just one forgotten password or inept cloud provider mistake away from permanently losing the results of years of effort.
(Many if not most of the decisions Nintendo made in the 2000s, particularly around internet gameplay for the gamecube, were equally confusing.)
Pokemon is the highest grossing media franchise in the world, higher than Star Wars. Mario comes in at number five, putting it above the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Batman, and Call of Duty.
We'll see how things shake out, but I would bet money that Nintendo will still be selling Pokemon, Mario, and Zelda games thirty years from now. I have no faith that Sony will even be making video game consoles at that point.
I know Microsoft has Halo, and Nintendo has enough exclusives to make Smash Bros.
I vaguely recall Sony making their own Smash Bros a few years back, but none of the IPs featured in it have had any recent entries, nor are really that prominent.
Halo is popular, but Sony has a much larger portfolio of exclusive IP than Microsoft does right now.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...
-they keep making systems based on gimmicks which limit the ability to make games on them or fulfill customer needs: cartridge format, second tv screen, motion controls,docking capability, etc.
-they waste a lot of time on gimmicks as well. Labo is a big failure, but its just like the ecard reader, GBA connectivity, and even to an extent Amiibos.
-their systems are underpowered and make it extremely hard to be a not-Nintendo developer on them. The Switch in particular has a horrid 3 party library of underpowered indie games you paid half as much for on other systems.
-They cannot embrace online
-their eshop is the most frustrating out of the three.
-Their exclusives are very hit or miss. Wii Fit died, Brain age died, Starfox is dead, Nintendogs is dead, Metroid is virtually dead, Advance Wars died, etc. ARMS seems to have died too. They are coasting on the strength of three core properties: mario, zelda, and pokemon.
Its pretty worrisome. They also didn't do themselves any favors by sunsetting the DS line, their portables insured against the failures of the home consoles. The portables also were good experimental platforms. If anything there may be a good risk they pull a Sega and just develop on others hardware.
Assuming that money is earning no interest and there is no inflation (just to make the calculation easier), they could lose over 250 million dollars a year for the next thirty years before they run out of money.
> they keep making systems based on gimmicks which limit the ability to make games on them or fulfill customer needs: cartridge format, second tv screen, motion controls,docking capability, etc.
The second and fifth best selling video game consoles of all time are the Wii and the DS, both of which are based on gimmicks (motion control and touch screen, respectively). The cartridge format is also more or less a necessity for a mobile console.
> they waste a lot of time on gimmicks as well. Labo is a big failure, but its just like the ecard reader, GBA connectivity, and even to an extent Amiibos.
If selling 39 million Amiibos [2] counts as kind of a waste, I'm not sure what would be considered a success. Nintendo does have their fair share of failures but any company does.
> their systems are underpowered and make it extremely hard to be a not-Nintendo developer on them. The Switch in particular has a horrid 3 party library of underpowered indie games you paid half as much for on other systems.
Doom 2016 is on the Switch, Skyrim is on the Switch, Dragonball Fighter Z is coming soon, Wolfenstein 2 is coming, Fornite is already there. The Switch has easily the best 3rd party lineup of any Nintendo console since the Gamecube. Not to mention the fact that the indie games you speak of are also insanely popular.
> They cannot embrace online
This one I agree with, although I don't think it's a problem. Nintendo doesn't need great online to be a successful company, unlike Microsoft or Sony.
> Their exclusives are very hit or miss. Wii Fit died, Brain age died, Starfox is dead, Nintendogs is dead, Metroid is virtually dead, Advance Wars died, etc. ARMS seems to have died too. They are coasting on the strength of three core properties: mario, zelda, and pokemon.
They are hit or miss, but they have far more hits than any other company. Splatoon is insanely popular. They just released a Star Fox game in 2016 for the Wii U so I'm not sure why you'd say it's dead. We also know that Metroid Prime 4 is in development and they literally just released two Metroid games for the 3DS in 2016 and 2017. ARMS sold over a million copies so I wouldn't declare it dead yet, although I don't think it did as well as Nintendo wanted it to.
> Its pretty worrisome. They also didn't do themselves any favors by sunsetting the DS line
They haven't sunset the 3DS line yet. They plan on supporting it at least through 2018 into 2019. They've been selling in a pretty consistent manner since 2016 - around 6 million units a year, I think.
[1] http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2017/11/nintendo_tops_toyo_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiibo#Collectibility_and_supp...
Mario, Mario Kart, Zelda, Metroid, Pokemon, Donkey Kong, Star Fox, etc.
Edit: Guess it's less shiny, more grimy violent third person-y
Leaders have no incentive to do it.
Exactly. No Vulkan support is the same problem as not allowing cross play - lock-in in case of MS and Sony. At least Nintendo support Vulkan on Switch:
https://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/conformant-prod...
Most Switch games are done in Unity, Unreal, Crysis and a couple of other lesser known middleware engines, taking advantage of NVN.
>yet is used as much as GL ES 1.0 was on the PS3.
Any Vulkan based engine can use it. Wasn't there Doom release for Switch?
Khronos keeps trying to advocate game developers to adopt Vulkan.
Meanwhile everyone already added DX12, Metal, NVN and LibCGNM to their engines.
Here for your education about game developer culture, Unreal demo at WWDC 2018, and the community live stream done afterwards.
> Khronos keeps trying to advocate game developers to adopt Vulkan
And you don't like that, since you are a big fan of lock-in apparently.
I am a big fan of games worthwhile playing and the related IP produced from them, regardless of the tools used to produce them.
If all consoles inter-operate we have come full circle and are simply gaming against other PC gamers.
Microsoft already sense this (and have done for a few years now), most of their 1st party titles for XboxOne can also be played on Windows. Going forward it sounds like they want to further employ this strategy to essentially make the Microsoft ecosystem the place to play games whether that be via a console (with its plug and play ease) or on Windows, or streamed to a mobile phone or tablet.
Nintendo are the outlier here though, but it will be interesting to see where Sony is positioning themselves in 5 or so years
This is an article about cross-play and your comment isn’t related to that, is it?
The upset seems to be over the very narrow case where someone dumps a ROM, shares it widely enough that Nintendo blocks it, then sells the genuine progenitor cartridge to an unwitting customer.
I can’t see that happening too often, it only affects online play, and it’s the exact same risk someone takes buying a used console (which are frequently blocked from online play for a number of TOS violations).
I’m fine with this.
While I am generally against DRM and over-reaching copy protection mechanisms, I think this is reasonable. Especially in the context of online play.
Sony's first goal every generation since the PSOne has been winning game developers to their side. Game devs like large user bases, but that's only one aspect of why a developer picks a console. Sony's primary focus every generation is to get everything else right: development tools, hardware storage and performance, consistent controller design, software medium, and so on. They've had some misfires here and there (the Cell processor comes to mind), but they typically outperform their competition in all of these categories.
I think it's because Sony knows their customer isn't the gamer, it's the game developer. The game developer's customer is the gamer. Again, user base numbers attract developers, but Sony recognizes that user bases are driven by developer support. It's definitely reciprocal, but Sony's dominance comes from understanding that catering to the developer is paramount. That's why they've consistently created an environment that breeds killer apps. I can't think of another platform maker in the last 20+ years who's been better.
So after 20 years of building up that kind of leverage with developers, it doesn't make much sense to just give part of it away until game developers make it clear they need it.
Out of curiosity, seeing as how some of those platforms are the bread and butter of companies that have market caps that far exceed Sony, what leads you to believe that?
I think a true quantitative comparison would have to account for market size, market share, age of the market, and typical industry profit margins.
A qualitative comparison might be more instructive, though. How many truly successful user experiences have been built on top of Facebook? Newsfeed, Messenger, and Ads? Maybe Farmville? On top of Google? Search, Gmail, Analytics and Ads? Less than a handful for both. Playstation, on the other hand, has had thousands of successful user experiences over a twenty year period.
Facebook, Google, and others often seem to have an adversarial relationship with their 3rd party developers. I could only imagine what types of amazing experiences we could be enjoying if they adopted the licensing model that's led Sony to dominate its industry for 20 years.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/02/oddworld-creator-ex-s...
[2] https://venturebeat.com/2014/07/06/last-gen-development/
[3] https://www.engadget.com/2009/04/03/killzone-developer-says-...
[4] https://gamingbolt.com/developer-explains-what-its-like-deve...
Has the PlayStation really done consistently better than the Xbox on all those fronts? Looking at development tools, online gaming, performance and storage, I could see a case for the PS4, but did Sony do a better job with the PS2 or PS3, than Microsoft with the Xbox/Xbox 360?
The perspective is interesting nonetheless.
The platforms you rattled off are far, far larger than Sony. So I don't think we can follow your point on "Sony understands the platform business better than anyone" at all.
The PS'es for a lot of their history were not dev friendly at all. This point also get's thrown at the window sadly [1] [2] [3].
Which then makes "I think it's because Sony knows their customer isn't the gamer, it's the game developer ... Sony's dominance comes from understanding that catering to the developer is paramount." nonsensical as it has been demonstrated that it's not that either.
"I can't think of another platform maker in the last 20+ years who's been better."
Eh, you did a pretty good job yourself listing off far better and larger platforms at the start of your comment so I think one can easily.
[1] http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.870167-Oddworl...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8167371
[3] https://www.cnet.com/news/sony-ps3-is-hard-to-develop-for-on...
The tech in these platforms is more similar than it's ever been. The consoles are trending towards basically being stripped down multi-core PCs optimized for video and memory bandwidth - especially now with half-step upgrades like the PS4 Pro and XBOne X. For many game developers building on top of engines like Unity or Unreal, they are no longer specifically designing for XBox or PS4 - they are targeting a common engine platform and then just tweaking the game content as needed to make sure it performs well enough on each platform.
Combine this with the fact that video games cost more than ever to develop and it makes less sense than ever for a 3rd party publisher to target any single platform. In order to recoup their dev budgets and make big profits, they want as huge an install base as possible. Epic would want Fortnite to run on toasters if they though people would play it there. Platform exclusives are essentially a thing of the past except in cases where the platform holder funds the development or owns the IP.
Sony may be the current leader in building first-party, system-exclusive action games to sell their platform, but the number of people who play those games is dwarfed by the mass appeal of something like Fortnite. By gaining the reputation as "the worst place to play Fortnite" (literally the world's most popular game), they are turning off a whole new generation of customers who may swap back to Microsoft when the next console generation hits.
In my opinion, this is nothing but Sony taking it advantage of it's #1 console position to try to force people to give them more money in the short term. I'm sure Microsoft would be doing the same thing if their current market positions were reversed. But I don't think it's good for their long-term business.
Sony isn't thinking long term. Either that, or they mistakingly believe that they're crushing the competition due to their business strategy, instead of Microsoft and Nintendo both shooting themselves in the foot. Microsoft will not be making their 2013 mistakes again during the next hardware launch.
If you want a guaranteed cheat-free experience you can always play solo or with a same-console party and never see any PC users.
There is no real argument to this except "Sony can be a dick, so Sony will be a dick." You can take off your cape now.
I’m sad to see you dismissing “authoritarian control over a platform” as “being a dick”, though. I prefer my society less authoritarian and my gaming platforms (and coding guidelines) more authoritarian, but I guess this isn’t the right venue to discuss that dissonance.
Technically no: there's exploits for lower versions of the PS4 firmware. I don't think there's anything out for the Xbox One so you're still good there. The Switch is wide open but Nintendo are quick on the banhammer if you go online with a modded console.
We're working on emunand so soon nintendo you'll be able to stay on lower system firmware but still run the latest for online and newer games.