Sony has accused Microsoft of "protecting inferior technology", following its admission last week that it reserves the right to deny games an Xbox Live Arcade release if they launch on PSN first.
Speaking in an interview with IndustryGamers, Sony's senior VP of publisher relations Rob Dyer argued that Microsoft's content submission and release policy stands in the way of innovation by denying multi-platform developers the right to exploit the PlayStation 3's high-end features.
"I think what [Xbox Europe boss] Chris [Lewis] and the other representatives at Microsoft are doing is protecting an inferior technology," he explained.
"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."
Microsoft's third party guidelines dictate that all games released on the Xbox 360 must launch "at least simultaneously" with other systems and must have "at least" the same features and content. It reserves the right to block release if those guidelines aren't met.
"That's a huge problem with them," continued Dyer.
"It first started on the smaller pubs, and we can talk about what's happened on XBL and the policy they have there that requires publishers to have a whole litany of things in order to get onto their network or they have to go through and be published by Xbox, by Microsoft, which essentially lets them dictate how long they'll be exclusive and whether or not they own the IP, etc, etc.
"We don't do that. We don't have any kind of policy like that.
"In fact, we've gone the other way to try and encourage publishers through our Pub Fund... We want to welcome the indies and we've seen that become a very big part of our business because indies are recognising that we aren't demanding a pound of flesh in order for them to get a game published on our network."
According to Dyer, it's a problem that extends to AAA developers as well as indies.
"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.
