Im getting tired of this False narrative!

Gaming
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Here is a quote from the jason schier article

The Japanese conglomerate owns about a dozen studios across the world as part of its PlayStation Studios label, but in recent years it has prioritized games made by its most successful developers. Studios such as Santa Monica, California-based Naughty Dog and Amsterdam-based Guerrilla Games spend tens of millions of dollars to make games with the expectation that the investments will pay off exponentially. And they usually do. Hits including 2018’s God of War and 2020’s The Last of Us Part II are exclusive to PlayStation consoles, helping Sony sell some 114 million of the PS4. Rival Microsoft Corp. has taken the opposite approach, relying on a wide array of studios to feed its Netflix-like subscription service, Xbox Game Pass, which allows users to pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to a variety of games.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-09/sony-s-obsession-with-blockbusters-is-stirring-unrest-within-playstation-empire

I’ve seen a few other from kinda funny mention similar opinions.

However I feel people are just creating this narritive in trying to sort of stifle claims that one platform is inferior, people are like “its not better or worse, its just different”

This is simply not the case when we look at the facts, infact if we look at the numbers Xbox are actually doing this more then sony, Xbox will have more tentpole platform defining franchises then sony, halo infinite is rumoured to be a $200 million game, starfield, gears 6, elderscrolls, fable, forza, perfect dark, wolf 3 etc etc are all big banger AAA games made to sell people to gamepass and the Xbox platform.

And then to flip statements like jasons on its head, how would returnal be explained? Or even rachet? Both these games are not going to be as expensive as a halo or horizon forbidden West!

People making these statements need to do better research.

This is whats happening

Xbox

  1. 4-8 AAAs per year
  2. 4-8 AAs oer year
  3. All available at no extra cost on game pass
  4. Playable on TVs + mobile with xcloud

Playstation

  1. 2-3 AAAs per year
  2. 1-3 AAAs per year

There is no different strategy Xbox is simply offering MORE! This is just a fact, you cant argue with 25 vs 12 devs or gamepass ultimate vs ps+, psnow.

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Yeah this narrative that Ms doesn’t need super AAA games is weird when they announced a lot more than Sony already, AND are announcing at a faster pace, so the gap will only grow.

There’s no 2 ways about it, MS is simply investing a lot more than sony on content and thus have a lot more in the pipeline

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There is definitely a narrative that Xbox is going for quantity versus Sony’s quality and that Game Pass will be full of ‘fodder’ in order to keep a release cadence. As you say, this is plainly not true and you will see plenty of big AAA games from Xbox this gen along with smaller AA titles. It is not a black or white situation.

I think people don’t realise how much bigger XGS studios is compared to Sony and the money Microsoft is investing into gaming, and why if you are still using the ‘Xbox has no games narrative’ you are going to lose that narrative badly.

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Sadly, this narrative will only truly end when most of the announced games launch for Xbox.

Else, they’ll just say that it’ll never come out or some dumb stuff about it.

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You aren’t wrong, but you can’t blame people for saying that, when we haven’t started to see the results yet.

Come back in a year or two and if people are still saying the same thing after a proven increase in the quantity of first party tiles, then you can call them wrong.

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With now double the studios and still expanding MS is going to be pumping out games at a much higher rate very very soon that Sony cannot compete with.

Sony’s business model looks like a Dinosaur now but will look even worse when all of MS’s first party studios start pumping out games at a crazy rate and they are all day one on gamepass.

At some point if you are still defending Sony in all this you are just a Sony fan and not an actual gamer

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These are the narratives you’re going to see until Xbox starts actually releasing these first party games at a good cadence. We know they got 23 studios and over 30 teams, but we haven’t got a year or two of data on how many AAA games they can put out per year.

It starts this fall with Halo Infinite and Starfield potentially.

2021 is going to be carried by day one AAA Xbox Game Pass games to fill the lineup gap.

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I could understand it with when they were building up XGS in 2018 and 2019, but not when the Bethesda purchase was announced. Xbox now has an entire publisher who has a clear track record of producing high quality games, so I don’t think the narrative holds up particularly well now in my opinion.

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It’s just a narrative that will be dispelled only by Xbox releasing great games. Just play the games and talk to like minded people.

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Sony has more chance than MS to get free third party support. In a way MS is brute forcing a diverse catalog. Hopefully it will work for them.

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A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. It’s true that MS has more potential but, until the games are out, that doesn’t really matter. I can also see an eventual situation where MS is putting out more but Sony games are still reviewing better, which will lead to a different conversation. In the end, it’s probably best not to get too wound up over narratives or media, and to just make decision based on what’s best for your use case.

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I think it’s mostly because the PS had better launch games and more 3rd party exclusives for the PS5 for the 1st year, Xbox on the other hand has been quieter relying more on Gamepass to help their games narrative. So the games narrative hasn’t actually shifted because the games haven’t released yet.

What people don’t realise is how the timeframes of games releases are going to play out next year on.

ND, Guerilla, Sucker Punch, Insomniac, PD and Japan studios all will have released games by 2020-21 or early 2022, so their next games will most likely be around 2024-25 timeframe. There is a possibility of having so downtime between releases.

Xbox on the other hand will ramp up from the end of 2021 and probably keep going at even faster rate with newer M/A. It just a matter of getting to Halo infinite/Starfield and then the narrative will definitely slowly change.

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Good point. It feels to me like Sony are banking on a strong first impression with full and timed exclusives to drive engagement and sales while MS are willing to forego that in exchange for a more steady stream of content. That would make sense if their strategies are sell units and big games vs entice people into a subscription service.

I’m sure that MS would have wanted a strong first impression as well, but things didn’t shake out that way. It makes total sense to me that they delayed Halo Infinite to make it a highly-polished exemplar, they need it to do well, even if it means getting some bad press until then. Imagine a consumer who isn’t invested in either ecosystem: they see a bunch of reviews praising Halo Infinite and apparently they can try it for a buck without needing special hardware? That kind of first impression can make a lifelong subscriber.

In the interest of fairness, I’ll point out that while Sony had more exclusive games ready for launch, their OS wasn’t fully-baked.

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Sony fans will hold onto that narrative as long as they can. Forums are already having massive nut job breakdowns just because Sony isn’t the media darling anymore. It’s like they just cant deal with the reality of legit competition and the concept that Sony might not be the king of the hill forever.

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To be charitable, I think it stems from the fact that sony’s internal studios are lazer focused on those big tentpoles whereas microsoft intentionally allows their studios to do wacky side projects.

Shit like grounded, sea of thieves, and bleeding edge would never get greenlit at sony.

But yeah there is def some implicit bias in how these companies are talked about. People aren;t used to microsoft having the bigger first party. Once this gen really gets going (2022 and beyond. Once covid is in the rearview for the first world) that perception will start to change.

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Sony has done an amazing job over the past few years of consistently releasing AAA games that achieve both critical acclaim and mainstream popularity.

Microsoft… You can make an argument for Gears and Forza but I think it’s very fair to say they have not matched Sony in this regard. It sure looks like this is poised to change over the next few years… but we’ll see. Maybe the narrative will change after the reality changes.

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Let the games do the talking. Since 2018 we had this “next E3 thing”. Let’s wait for the results.

That is also true. Also the case with Mojang who does whatever they want rather than giving the first / better support to Xbox Series.

Bleeding Edge aside - I do wonder why it failed even with Game Pass - other games are very popular. They are just not AAA GOTY third person action games or graphics demos. Calling them shit is overkill, they are very cool games.

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I would argue that Sea of Thieves and even Forza Horizon 4 have achieved a great popularity too. 20 millions to 24 millions are not rookie numbers.

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I was using shit as a general term for stuff. I wasn’t assigning value.

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With a fresh start into a new generation and considering subscription services, it won’t matter as much. Game Pass is growing very well and publishers are only considering these numbers for when they put their games on the service.