Lost in his comments about cross-play yesterday was the comments about the differences between developers making PS4 Pro and Xbox One X
He was asked after that about the Xbox One X being the best version of the games Sony has marketing deals with and if there is pressure for parity. He said it's up to the developers but they are not forcing parity.
”I'm not going to go into the detail of what's embedded into individual contracts with publishing partners. What I would do is cast our minds back to the PS3 generation, where we had on paper more impressive specifications than our competition, and in some areas by quite a considerable margin.
”Now, that didn't play out the way we had anticipated it would – and this is nothing to do with co-marketing deals, this is just general developer and publisher dynamics.
”What happened was that developers, maybe at the behest of publishers, developed up to the lowest common denominator and stopped there. And in very few cases took advantage of the additional horsepower of the PS3.
”Now, I'm a big believer of learning lessons from history. History doesn't always repeat itself. But if you're a publisher of video games, that is a perfectly commercially rational approach for you to take," he said. ”Because you only do one set of work. You don't do one set of work to get up to one level and then a different amount of work and consequently may need to go further."
He was asked after that about the Xbox One X being the best version of the games Sony has marketing deals with and if there is pressure for parity. He said it's up to the developers but they are not forcing parity.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-06-14-the-big-interview-sonys-jim-ryanEG: Where you have a marketing deal with a game, maybe Destiny 2, Call of Duty or Battlefield, are you encouraging or telling the publishers, do not make the Xbox One X version significantly better than the PS4 Pro version? Is that something Sony is telling these publishers?
Jim Ryan: Not to my knowledge. Take the Destiny deal. The Destiny deal was actually done in February 2013, right? We hadn't launched PS4. I might be wrong because great minds are at work in far-flung corners of Tokyo and San Mateo, but I don't think anybody even thought of PS4 Pro at this stage.
So, I think you're trying to see some sort of nefarious platform-holder activity where likely none exists.
EG: Fair enough! If that's the case, that's the case. But the Xbox One X is a more powerful console than the PS4 Pro. It's very difficult to argue with the specs. And Microsoft is making the point quite hard - and they did this throughout their conference - that there is no technical reason why a game that comes out on both those platforms shouldn't look and perform better on Xbox One X. Isn't that comparison a problem for you?
Jim Ryan: Well, we'll see when they launch in six months' time. The number of partnerships, and yes they are big titles, I won't dispute that, it's small. There are a handful. There will be hundreds of games published this year and those games, market forces will prevail. If a developer or publisher wants to take advantage of the supposed power of the X, they will do that. If they don't, they won't.