I kind of don't know how to address my annoyance with your tone without going on a rant. So, for starters, I want to make it clear: I'm not a platform warrior of any kind. Not the PC, not Nintendo, not iOS, not Sony, and surely NOT Microsoft. As it pertains to the latter. I don't have an Xbox One. I'm not planning on getting one any time in the near future. While I have a 360, it was the last platform I got last gen, and has spent the better part of 4 years now in a closet. The only times I busted it out were in October of last year to play Just Dance with a used Kinect I bought for my wife after she saw Conan's Clueless Gamer review of it, and about a month before that to play Halo 1 for one night. Since about November, it's been back in the closet.
Meanwhile, I own a PS4, got a PS3 within six months of its release, got a PS2 on launch day, and got a PS1 the first Christmas it was out. I also have a Vita and a PSP. So, I want to make it clear that I have no ax to grind against Sony. I am not someone cruising in here to take glee in the console wars so that I can make drive-by posts about "LOL I could melt the polar ice caps with all dat salt amirite LOLZ take that Sony ponies!" I thought my initial post was reasonable.
Here was my first post that you replied to again:
Honestly, "pissed off" strikes me as a bit excessive. I'd stop at "being bummed" as being a response I can empathize with. Honestly, if it were up to me, every game could come out on every platform possible and I'd be happy. But when large corporations are competing directly against each other for a share of the same pie, I've been in this hobby long enough to understand that investments for exclusivity come with the territory. And I'm not saying that everyone else can't draw their own lines on what is and isn't acceptable, but I personally don't see it as a very fruitful exercise to try and delineate between which partnerships were on the up-and-up and which are sleazeball moves made by greedy executives in smoke-filled board rooms wherein I clearly am referring to the kind of smoke that can only come from expensive cigars lit with one hundred dollar bills.
I tried to take a nuanced stance, even though I understand that some are going to feel the right to be indignant all the same. Personally, I feel like analyzing deals like this are complex. When trying to ascertain what is and isn't fair, I feel like we can go back and forth all day with "on the one hand there's this" and "but on the other hand there's that" type claims and comparisons that are kind of close but don't quite fit. But at the end of the day, I think we do all agree that it's not out of line for first parties to
invest into the development of third party games with the expectation of some benefits for their own platform to result, right? Again, I'm not launching into some sort of "you're a hypocrite if you supported scenario X in the past but are against this" argumentation. But I do feel like it's similar enough to so many other exclusivity deals that exist in gaming and general retail at large that it just feels like business as usual to me, even if it's
not exactly the same thing as any of numerous other examples of exclusivity I can cite.
Further, the suspicion that it's just a timed exclusive also makes it harder for me to get on board with the notion that consumers should be fired up here. Fans of Sony platforms that want to play Tomb Raider on their Sony hardware are almost certainly still going to get the chance to play this game, just not as soon as they'd like. Do I think they need to be happy about this and pre-order the late port anyway? No. I conceded that I felt like they had the right to be bummed. I understand completely why seeing these kinds of moves don't make fans happy, because it doesn't have anything to do with making a better game or getting the game out into as many fans' hands as possible. But, I felt my position was reasonable. Enter you:
Would you be upset if the largest grocery store chain in your town paid the dairy companies to keep milk, cheese, and butter out of every other grocery store? Just business right, oh wait that would be illegal.
What really bothers me about this post is not the bad analogy (and it is bad) in as much as the way you conclude it in such a snarky fashion after failing to articulate the point. Granted, you did expound on where you were going with it in your most recent reply:
Market dominating firms, of which microsoft is one albeit not in gaming, cannot use their position and unmatched resources to restrict competitors' access to markets and products because it hurts consumers and is anti-competitive. It is easier to see this when not using emotionally charged examples, hence dairy.
And I can understand the ultimate point you were alluding to. However, I still don't think this is an apt comparison. I understand why buying up exclusive rights is not a general practice that we should cheer on, and I'm not saying that we should cheer on this one. For the umpteenth time, I'll reiterate that I understand consumers finding this distasteful. But we're concerned about companies starting monopolies and strong-arming competition out with unfair practices. We're particularly concerned about that as it relates to commodities like food.
So, yes, a store buying up all the dairy so that no other store has any would obviously be bad. But that's not the situation here. We're not talking about a store buying up all the dairy, we're talking about buying up all the dairy products available from one dairy. No store I go to only has one brand of milk, cheese, butter, etc. So (and I'm going to use local examples here), it's like finding out that I have to switch to Dean's brand milk now because Schnuck's bought up the exclusive rights to Prairie Farms
And it's not even that. MS didn't get exclusive access to all Square Enix games, just this one. And it's not even exclusive forever, just for an undisclosed period of time. So given that, I don't think it's absurd to write off your analogy as asinine. Further, I want to stress that my harshness in that assertion is a direct response to what I thought was a bad faith post on your part. I don't expect you to high five me and praise every post I make, but I honestly thought I explained myself quite reasonably, only to be met with a pithy, snarky post that didn't seem to think it was worth the effort to address my perspective earnestly.
