Holy shit. That is an incredibly disgusting policy. Should be illegal honestly.
It's not illegal because their console business isn't considered a monopoly. You're not
obligated to do business with them at this point, and the only real threat they have is not
allowing you to do business with them. In the case of EndWar, they obviously couldn't force him to remove the feature from the PS3 version, but they
could prevent him from publishing the 360 version if he insisted on making them look like a bunch of chumps by exposing the shortcomings of their platform. The choice was entirely Julian's, and it was fairly simple, cut the PS3 feature, or forfeit the millions of dollars he'd
already invested in developing the 360 version, along with half of his potential sales. Hopefully, Julian learned his lesson and didn't waste any time trying to do anything special on PlayStation in his next game.
But like I said, MS can do this because doing business with them is still considered optional. Julian's not obligated to make games for them at all, and we're not obligated to buy their console, thereby putting pressure on Julian to bring his games there. MS can walk in to court and say, "Hey, it's not our fault if they're actually dumb enough to do what we say," and that's that. The government won't step in until their market share is like 90% or higher. Only then will the courts say, "Well, stupid or not, they don't really have any choice here, so
now you need to play nice."
It's not really illegal to be anti-competitive, or anti-consumer for that matter, and it's not illegal to be a monopoly. It's only when you
abuse a monopoly position that you run afoul of the law.
they have a lot those. No crossplay, either.
Well, it's a little more complicated than that. MS don't want cross-platform play on XBox because it helps maintain the illusion that Live Gold is magically good and totally worth the $50-60/year;
double, even, or so I've been told. But at the same time, if PS3-PC play was happening, that may make PSN look sorta good, since some of my friends are on PC, and fuck, it's
free… So to that end, they make the same generous offer they offered Julian; cut the feature and you'll be allowed to publish on XBox.
This generation, it seems Ono decided not to bother seeking Microsoft's permission to do as he pleased, and offered SFV as an exclusive to Sony, finally giving
himself the final decision on the features and content in his game. Yay for Ono! \(^.^)/