Fighting Words from SCEA’s Marketing Boss
SCEA hardware marketing boss John Koller talked about Microsoft’s need to pay for third-party exclusives, such as the downloadable episodes for GTA IV. Koller cites that such decisions stem from Microsoft’s acknowledgment of a lack of strength in their own 1st party lineup. “Microsoft has had a much more lenient policy to writing cheques than we do,” he said.
“We don’t feel the need to write cheques necessarily with every publisher, like they did with the Lost and Damned and some other titles, because we feel very strongly in our first-party line-up. I think it’s safe to say that we’d put our first-party line-up against anyone’s, and Microsoft and other manufacturers probably lead a little bit when they’re writing cheques about how they feel about their own internal line-up.”
Microsoft’s payment was allegedly $50 million for Rockstar’s DLC, which includes a second downloadable episode set to release this October.
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5 Responses to “Fighting Words from SCEA’s Marketing Boss”
Well it goes to show that Sony feels confident in its methods of game development that they don’t feel the need to “pay for play” with their game developers. Also when you look at the quality of the PS3 ie failure rate vs Microsoft they are also ahead in that department. Sony’s hardware is a lot more robust so they don’t have to pay to get dev’s to work with them…
i think sony is doing fine right now. there are so many awesome games coming out on the ps3 and all ready out. Sony has a muhc better game line up. The only game i would want on the ps3 that the xbox has would be gears of war. Sony knows what they are doing and in the end i think the ps3 will beat the xbox.
MS thinks they can just buy everything like they do with everything else, but in the end it is hurting developers as people just get mad and don’t buy their titles anymore.
Also let’s face it GTA was not that great to begin with (I’ll never understand the high scores and perfect 10′s it received). I hope the MS payments are enough to deal with the sales loss (yeah I’m looking at you Star Ocean).
It truly does speak volumes about your own software when you have to pay to play like MS does
It only hurts gaming overall, way to go MS.