It's kind of shocking how many quality studios Sony has developed/acquired.
It's also shocking how inept Microsoft is at doing the same.
This isn't a dig at MS - it's just reality. I don't get it honestly.
MS should have more money to throw at these devs... is Sony just *that* much better at cultivating talent?
Part of it is that yes, Sony really is that much better at cultivating talent, specifically creative talent. Sony is a major media company with a pedigree in music and film, and it knows how to manage creatives. What is today Worldwide Studios (or PlayStation Studios, I guess?) famously had its origins in Sony's music publishing business back during the PS1 days.
The other part is that Sony
needs its games business to be well-managed in a way that Microsoft doesn't. Gaming is the golden goose for Sony, and Sony executives are held to account first and foremost for their stewardship of the games side of the business.
Microsoft's golden goose is Windows and Office and various enterprise software and server stuff. In many of these sectors it's basically a monopoly. Nobody is really entirely sure why Microsoft is in gaming in the first place, and so the primary role of Xbox executives is to sell Microsoft's continued involvement in gaming to their bosses using twelve-dimensional chess, fad-chasing, and corporate nonsense speak.
You can see this dichotomy represented in the design of the PS5 and the XSX, just like with the PS4 and the Xbone. In both cases, Sony zeroed in on the most efficient way to maximize performance and ease of development for the money. Sony's goal is to make the strongest possible console, backed up by the strongest possible bench of first party exclusives, so it can dominate the market and continue to print money.
Microsoft, on the other hand, obviously had other priorities. "We need to make the strongest possible console, backed up by the strongest possible bench of first party exclusives, so we can dominate the market" simply isn't an appealing pitch to Microsoft's top brass. What they want to hear is "we're riding this Kinect fad into control of the living room" or "we're designing a console architecture that will also work in server racks" or "TVTVTV/Gamepass will allow us to compete with Apple and Google and Amazon."
Microsoft cares about the games business only insofar as it's part of a decades-long war of position with the other tech giants. Even when brass can be convinced to shell out major money to help Xbox stay afloat (the RROD repairs, the Bethesda purchase, etc), there's no telling when Microsoft's corporate politics will shift and everyone will lose interest in gaming again. You can't cultivate talent in that kind of environment, which is why everything Microsoft touches in the games space turns to shit.
www.neogaf.com
Loved the series and played each one extensively! I miss the good games they had
