No, I’m pretty sure they’re referring to things like the Resident Evil Village marketing deal - that contract was leaked as part of the Capcom hack, but I’d bet Microsoft is aware of more of them that have not been made public (presumably from asking devs about Game Pass and being told “our contract with Sony prevents…

Microsoft is not complaining about exclusivity here. They’re rebuting Sony’s complaints.

That’s kind of Microsoft’s point, actually. Sony is telling Brazil “them getting exclusivity on COD is unfair”. And one of Microsoft’s rebuttals was “you do it too, you know”, and the other one was actually “you don’t care about COD exclusivity like you claimed because you already know we won’t do it - you’re really sc…

Resident Evil Village is the specific example (their contract details leaked in the Capcom hack).

It’s a lot different in my opinion, although not necessarily in a way that is any more nefarious (I do think that is at least debatable, though). It’s a coordinated attempt to suppress the perceived success/effectiveness of a new business model that Sony doesn’t like. It feels less about bolstering the quality of…

There are probably core technical issues that are the primary cause of bottlenecks right now. There comes a point in any form of product development (be it games, software, hardware, cars, etc. etc.) where more people won’t get you faster results. 343 is huge, I don’t think more people is the answer. More tenured, expe…

To be able to craft a weapon in the first place, a special red border version of it needs to drop a handful of times. Sometimes this takes weeks. In the new Duality Dungeon it can take even longer

I wish more F2P games were structured like Destiny. For all the (very valid) complaints about it not respecting time and having money-grab problems of its own, they have nailed the season pass. I don’t understand paying for a cosmetics-only season pass, to be honest. But with Destiny, you’re genuinely buying new…

Worse when it’s the only option, yes. But when it’s just a choice, no. As of now, every game you get via Game Pass, you could go out and buy to own if you want to (in fact, Microsoft will even give you a 10% discount on it if you do!) And in fact, being able to play it at release on Game Pass and then buy it to own a…

They’re all Series X blades, and then depending on the game (and maybe the target resolution?) they either give you the whole thing (i.e. you’re playing on a full-blown Series X), or they use virtualization to split that Series X into pieces and run multiple sessions off the single blade.

That’s just access to a cloud server. You still have to write, deploy, and run your own software on them. And in fact, Microsoft doesn’t just use commodity Azure servers for xCloud - they actually strapped full-blown Xbox Series X blades into their data centers instead, so even from a hardware perspective Sony is…

So much of it is just about proximity to the nearest datacenter, and Microsoft is untouchable there. Yes, Sony buys streaming servers from Microsoft, but it’s far more cost prohibitive to host your service in every single one of the DCs when you’re an external party paying per minute for the usage, not to mention…

It’s also not even as simple as just saying “oh, they both offer streaming for price X, streaming-box-check”. There’s a lot of nuance to how seamlessly the streaming is integrated in Game Pass that makes it really attractive. There are very few games I’d ever want to play all the way through on streaming. But the…

1 is for PC and the other is coming to PS so why bother.

If you don’t enjoy Microsoft’s own games then you won’t get much value out of Game Pass - agreed. But then why do you even own an Xbox? So I think any sort of realistic comparison has to just assume that the gamer in question must like those games, otherwise what do they care?

Yea, this article really falls short in my opinion. This would be an opportunity to look at what we know about each service and project out how much value you get out of each over the long term. Especially because PS Plus “wins” on price via the lock-you-in-for-a-year pricing - sure, that’s fine and technically true,…

I think you need to do a bit more editorializing in your comparisons so as to back up your conclusion of a winner in each category. You don’t do much direct describing of how you feel the libraries compare, and what little point of comparison you do make is phrased in a way that makes it sound like you think that Game…

You’re right that it’s just about market forces, but you’re wrong that how a company gained its market position matters. Whether they bought it or made it over time doesn’t matter. What matters is what portion of the market they control. And Microsoft controls neither a majority nor a plurality, even after the…

Market share is a pretty apples-to-oranges comparison given the wildly different strategies, but even if you set that aside and compare them anyway, Sony is also winning there. They are the big fish in this pond. Microsoft just has more non-gaming revenue to play with. Are you suggesting that if someone grows so big…

but there’s a significant difference between buying smaller studios and funding their new exclusive projects yourself (Sony) and buying juggernaut studios so you can lock down their already dominant IPs (MS).