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Hey, how come Sony didn't invest in any big 3rd party exclusives?

BadWolf

Member
I only wants MGSV...do something Yosp as Koji is getting too cosy with those X guys

Wouldn't worry, E3 was easy money for KojiPro since MS was buying up conference showings.

The game is still multi-plat and so will the future one's be at the very least (unless Kojima wants to abandon the Japanese fanbase).
 

El Sloth

Banned
Sony has invested in a few big 3rd party "exclusives". Microsoft simply has a much bigger warchest to pull from. This has always been one of their big advantages over the other two big consoke hardware makers and is arguably the reason the biggest reason they were able to pull through with the original Xbox.

I think Sony's strategy of attracting and putting a spotlight on indies is an interesting one because it's a lot cheaper in the long run and lets them point to this large bunch of games they'll be able to offer on their system which is something they can use in their advertising. Useful if they want to make it a pure "numbers" game.

I couldn't give a crap about hardly any of the indie games because I'm not one of you gaming hipsters. The PS4 still has better hardware, better online and games I want (bar Titanfall).
Hahaha, gaming hipsters. Is it impossible for people to enjoy things without having to be labeled shit like fanboys, dudebros, and now this shit? So silly.
 

Hindle

Banned
As long as a game sells hardware then it doesn't matter whether it's a 1st or 3rd party exclusive.

MS have money to buy 3rd party exclusives and they're currently staffing up several new studios so going forward they'll be able to release games using both approaches.
 

DC R1D3R

Banned
As long as a game sells hardware then it doesn't matter whether it's a 1st or 3rd party exclusive.

MS have much more money than Sony to buy 3rd party exclusives and they're currently staffing up several new studios so going forward they'll be able to release games using both approaches.

Stop being so modest bro :]
 
SONYCOMPUENTERTAINMENT.jpg

need I say more....
world wide studios
 
I bet you if Sony announced an exciting looking 3rd party developed fighter (at launch), I'd bite!

Me and a myriad of others.......

Still doesn't explain why they have a lack of foresight. That 3rd party game could very well become multi platform and there goes one of the big reasons on buying their platform. Now if it was first party it would be forever exclusive to Sony.
 

coldfoot

Banned
No need to invest in third parties when you've got a bunch of studios to fund + all multiplatform games will look and run better on your console anyways.
 

The Lamp

Member
Because they have better first party exclusives coming, as usual, and the third party exclusives will come to PS4 anyway.
 
Because investing in 3rd party exclusives is fucking stupid nowadays. Publishers don't want exclusivity unless you spend a lot of money - and by a lot, you'll have to pretty much fund the game -, they want their games released for fucking toasters if possible to get as much money as they can.

Most 3rd party exclusives will go multiplat eventually and there goes your big advantage. Right now MS is banking heavily on Titanfall and we all know that's going multiplat eventually. Meanwhile investing on 1st parties means you'll always have a steady flow of truly exclusive titles.
 
Sony is investing long-term. Microsoft, short term because they know most of their 1st party studios are second or third tier to Sony's studios.

They had some fantastic studios though. Bizarre (really should have bought them instead of letting them to Activision), Ensemble, FASA, ACES.
 

Hindle

Banned
Because investing in 3rd party exclusives is fucking stupid nowadays. Publishers don't want exclusivity unless you spend a lot of money - and by a lot, you'll have to pretty much fund the game -, they want their games released for fucking toasters if possible to get as much money as they can.

Most 3rd party exclusives will go multiplat eventually and there goes your big advantage. Right now MS is banking heavily on Titanfall and we all know that's going multiplat eventually. Meanwhile investing on 1st parties means you'll always have a steady flow of truly exclusive titles.

If Titanfall or any 3rd party exclusive sells millions of consoles and Live subscriptions, then goes multiplatform. Well those consoles have still been sold and MS have still made all that money from the sales.

Timed exclusives aren't stupid at all dude.
 
If Titanfall or any 3rd party exclusive sells millions of consoles and Live subscriptions, then goes multiplatform. Well those consoles have still been sold and MS have still made all that money from the sales.

Timed exclusives aren't stupid at all dude.

You're missing the other half of the equation.

The half that has their biggest shareholders fucking pissed.
 
If Titanfall or any 3rd party exclusive sells millions of consoles and Live subscriptions, then goes multiplatform. Well those consoles have still been sold and MS have still made all that money from the sales.

Timed exclusives aren't stupid at all dude.
Timed exclusives aren't, but banking on them is. Sure they'll get them a lot of sales, but how much money was spent making them exclusive, specially an EA game?

Sure MS has a lot of money to spend, doesn't mean it's wise to.
 
Do you think thier shareholders are pissed at the $1BN Gears of War made MS this gen? Gears being a 3rd party exclusive btw.

Xbox hasn't earned MS a single dollar, let alone a billion of them. MS paying out the ear to secure exclusives like Gears is part of the reason why.
 

beast786

Member
Do you think thier shareholders are pissed at the $1BN Gears of War made MS this gen? Gears being a 3rd party exclusive btw.


Gears of War was publish by MS. It's not 3rd Party. it's as 3rd Party as Heavy Rain and The Order 1886 or Heavinly Sword.

Also how much did they paid for publishing it?
 
D

Deleted member 20920

Unconfirmed Member
Not sure this has been said but why waste money on moneyhatting when they can use the money to make their own games. As far as exclusives goes, it seems like building a stronger first party lineup is more important these days.
 

Hindle

Banned
Xbox hasn't earned MS a single dollar, let alone a billion of them. MS paying out the ear to secure exclusives like Gears is part of the reason why.

Gears of War as a franchise has made MS over 1BN at retail. It's common knowledge.

Do you know how much MS paid Epic btw? If not, how do you know they paid through the ear?
 

KoopaTheCasual

Junior Member
Sony. It's all about Sony.

So the company that invested long term on internal studio growth, had worse foresight than the company that has to pay for third party exclusives and timed exclusives as they're rolling out? How does that even work? MS has good things going for them since E3, but foresight is the opposite of that.
 

BigDug13

Member
Gears of War as a franchise has made MS over 1BN at retail. It's common knowledge.

Do you know how much MS paid Epic btw? If not, how do you know they paid through the ear?

MS has not seen profit from their Xbox brand. That's the bottom line. Shareholders don't give a shit about your one franchise example of profitability.
 
If Titanfall or any 3rd party exclusive sells millions of consoles and Live subscriptions, then goes multiplatform. Well those consoles have still been sold and MS have still made all that money from the sales.

Timed exclusives aren't stupid at all dude.

Plus Microsoft gets to group everything together in its marketing message. At next year's E3 they will say this, essentially word for word: "This [insert TitanFall release month here], TitanFall came out on Xbox One as a next gen exclusive. We're here to announce the DLC coming this summer to Xbox One first (conjecture)! [after a break for a trailer] It's already been a great year for Xbox One and it's going to get even better with Call of Duty and Halo!"

They will sum it up by saying that "Xbox One is the only place for you to play all the world's biggest First Person Shooters!"

Eventually, I see Microsoft heading away from this strategy and toward a more mixed strategy where they have important timed exclusives and a healthy mix of 1st party games, outside of the usual suspects. I believe that the people at Microsoft know that they need more than Halo to push consoles out the door but that won't stop them from leaning heavily on it in the meantime.
 

wenis

Registered for GAF on September 11, 2001.
Because 1 out of 4 games mentioned in your OP looks interesting... Sony on the other hand is looking to grow with some indie developers and see where they take them.
 
Gears of War as a franchise has made MS over 1BN at retail. It's common knowledge.

Do you know how much MS paid Epic btw? If not, how do you know they paid through the ear?

You think Epic was giving away a franchise like Gears for chump change? They're the ones who pay to make these games, and there were potentially millions of sales they could get on ps3 with each installment. MS had to pay enough to cover that.
 
Because there's no need to. Even with those 3rd party "exclusives" Microsoft is struggling in pre-orders.

They also actually have their own first-party network too.
 
MS has not seen profit from their Xbox brand. That's the bottom line. Shareholders don't give a shit about your one franchise example of profitability.

They have profited over a $1,000,000,000 for the last three years off of the Xbox. NPV back to 2001 has been negative but those are all sunk costs. The future is what's important and they have turned the Xbox line into a profit center.
 

Hindle

Banned
Securing a 3rd party exclusive from a developer like Insomniac or Respawn is a smart move. Studios who consist of developers who've got decades worth of experience in shipping AAA games and have had success across different franchises.

Yea, I wouldn't call it a bad move to moneyhat studios like above.
 
Sony has always taken the organic approach, creating desireable platforms and raising up/acquiring devs. Moneyhatting costs money, and has little long term effect. This is one reason why the Xbox division loses money.

But it has cost Sony from time to time.
 

Hindle

Banned
MS has not seen profit from their Xbox brand. That's the bottom line. Shareholders don't give a shit about your one franchise example of profitability.

Gears is an example of how it's smart to partner with adeveloper as the franchise made a great deal of money.
 

Kunan

Member
They will likely do what they did with the 360. Buy out enough exclusives to patch over the smaller first party output for the first few years, beefing up the library, then just stop paying for them once the hardcore are hooked on your machine. They hit a critical mass with sales, then started focusing on capturing a new market and paying for timed DLC on multiplayer games to keep people rooted.

It's certainly not a bad plan but, as a consumer, I'd rather they had continued investing into studios like Ensemble. With bought exclusives you, as a consumer, have no guarantee they will continue into the future. With first party devs, you have the knowledge that they must be continuing to make you more exclusive titles later. At the very least, the financial risk of canning said studios is much higher than just not paying someone for an exclusive next year.
 
Securing a 3rd party exclusive from a developer like Insomniac or Respawn is a smart move. Studios who consist of developers who've got decades worth of experience in shipping AAA games and have had success across different franchises.

Yea, I wouldn't call it a bad move to moneyhat studios like above.

Considering how badly the last Ratchet and Resistance games did at retail (and also in terms of quality), I don't think Insomniac is a wise investment.
 
Gears of War as a franchise has made MS over 1BN at retail. It's common knowledge.

Do you know how much MS paid Epic btw? If not, how do you know they paid through the ear?

Honestly we don't know the numbers for either system well enough

One of the reasons I always hate the MS has a bigger warchest argument as we have no idea how much money the xbox division has to play with nor the PS division

I think it's most likely that MS has more money at its disposal but to state it as fact as an argument is silly without having substantiated numbers for both

Same is true comparing 1st party games

We don't know all the numbers

Just my thoughts
 

Hindle

Banned
You think Epic was giving away a franchise like Gears for chump change? They're the ones who pay to make these games, and there were potentially millions of sales they could get on ps3 with each installment. MS had to pay enough to cover that.

There was no install base for either console when MS paid Epic to make Gears. Right from the start, it was a coperative contract.

A contract that paid great dividends.

Securing 3rd party games as exclusives is a perfectly valid tactic and one that makes great business sense.

Edit. Anyway, I sense as always people don't really understand the business side of the industery in here so I'm out.
 

Verendus

Banned
They don't have a bunch of mediocre or unproven first parties like MS, so they don't need to run around securing terrible stuff like Ryse for launch.

Having said that, of course there are third party exclusives.

Verendus said that Sony acquired two Sega exclusives, instead of taking Sonic. We'll see if this tip materializes eventually.
I haven't said that. Two unrelated things there. This seems to be a case of misinterpretation, Watson.
 

nib95

Banned
Microsoft basically money hat third parties because they don't have as many first party studios. Sony instead invest in first party, many of whom have expanded massively this generation.
 
Honestly we don't know the numbers for either system well enough

One of the reasons I always hate the MS has a bigger warchest argument as we have no idea how much money the xbox division has to play with nor the PS division

I think it's most likely that MS has more money at its disposal but to state it as fact as an argument is silly without having substantiated numbers for both

Same is true comparing 1st party games

We don't know the all the numbers

Just my thoughts

Xbox is one of Bill Gate's favorite projects and he is still the Chairman of the Board. It only stands to reason that it will get a larger budget than the Playstation. Take it with a grain of salt but Microsoft claimed to have committed a billion dollars to content creation for the next Xbox. While that figure probably includes marketing, it is a huge number that isn't feasible within Sony.
 

Malice215

Member
Sony is not going to money hat third parties because they don't have any reason to, but they will spend money on exclusive content which I think is smarter in the long run. You need to come up with a good chunk of change for a third party to compensate for the money they're not going to make on the other platform by going exclusive.

MS needs to money hat third parties to sell people on the console and to stay competitive since they don't have much coming out of the studios that they already own which is baffling to me because they have very talented studios under their umbrella.

Titanfall looks amazing, but is it amazing enough to buy a $500 console and when you can also get the game on PC?
 

mooooose

Member
Microsoft doesn't have good studios. They all died, closed, or were mismanaged and might as well be dead. Sony doesn't have this problem.
 
D

Deleted member 125677

Unconfirmed Member
Because they have the best and biggest lineup of first-party studios on the planet?

Well well well, in what measurable way could this be anywhere near true? Are you trying to say: "i like their games the most" ?
 
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