Microsoft is not a stranger to accusations and lawsuits, as the company has frequently come under fire for using their market dominance to unfairly control various aspects of the industry.
Sony is now attacking the powerhouse company for “protecting inferior technology”, which despite being a real complaint from Sony, is also a thinly-veiled insult. In short, those be fightin’ words.
This accusation comes in the wake of Microsoft admitting last week that they reserve the right to deny games an XBLA release if they launch on the PSN first.
In an interview with IndustryGamers, Sony’s senior VP of publisher relations, Rob Dyer, has accused Microsoft of preventing innovation, as they are denying multi-platform developers the right to make use of the Playstation 3’s more powerful hardware – hence “protecting an inferior technology”.
He explains, “I think they want to dumb it down and keep it as pedestrian as possible so that if you want to do anything for Blu-ray, or you have extra content above 9GB, or you want to do anything of that nature, you’d better sure as heck remember that Microsoft can’t handle that.”
These issues arise over Microsoft’s third party guidelines, which reserve the right to block a release if it doesn’t launch “at least simultaneously” with other systems, and have “at least” the same features and content.
Rob Dyer explains that the problem used to lie more with indie releases, but that Microsoft has now extended this reach to AAA titles as well.
“It’s now progressed to not just be these smaller indie pubs that are obviously very easy to kick around. It’s moved up the food chain. It’s gone to B and A level publishers,” he said.
“So potentially any time we’ve gone out and negotiated exclusive content of things that we’ve announced at things like DPS or E3, publishers are getting the living crap kicked out of them by Microsoft because they are doing something for the consumer that is better on our platform than it might be perceived on theirs.
“So from a creativity standpoint and what we are doing to try to make it better for the consumer, our view is Microsoft’s doing everything they can to eliminate that because they have an inferior technology.”
These are some pretty big accusations, and certainly a compelling argument. A cross-platform game being forced to lower its potential to equalize with a hardware ceiling of another console could leave a lot of PS3 owners very unhappy, as their superior hardware also comes with a higher price tag.
What do you think? Is this shady business practices or is this just good business? Some may argue this is ruining the spirit of competition, while others may argue that Microsoft is simply demonstrating a superior business strategy.
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