In a recent interview, Sony’s Senior Vice President of Publisher Relations, Rob Dyer, stated that Microsoft was dumbing down gaming with their exclusivity deals and are forcing companies to not want to take advantage of the PS3’s technological advantages over the Xbox 360.
“I think what [Xbox Europe boss] Chris Lewis and the other representatives at Microsoft are doing is protecting an inferior technology. I think they want to dumb it down and keep it as pedestrian as possible so that if you want to do anything for Blu-ray or you have extra content above 9GB or you want to do anything of that nature, you’d better sure as heck remember that Microsoft can’t handle that,” Dyer argues.
Dyer gave this in response to Microsoft’s multiformat release policy which states that, “should content not be shipped simultaneously with competing platforms in all regions where the content is available, or should the content and features available on the Xbox 360 not be in parity with versions on competing platforms, then Microsoft reserves the right to not allow that content to be published for Xbox 360 or released on Xbox Live marketplace.”
“So potentially any time we’ve gone out and negotiated exclusive content of things that we’ve announced at things like DPS or E3, publishers are getting the living crap kicked out of them by Microsoft because they are doing something for the consumer that is better on our platform than it might be perceived on theirs. So from a creativity standpoint and what we are doing to try to make it better for the consumer, our view is Microsoft’s doing everything they can to eliminate that because they have an inferior technology,” Dyer concludes.
In essence, Dyer believes that Microsoft is preventing the possibility of great content showing up on superior technology, such as the PlayStation 3. Dyer also thinks that Microsoft needs to understand that their actions are not of a competitive nature, but of a hostile nature. Microsoft is pretty much killing any creative exposure of titles to “make up for their own platform’s shortcomings.”
