Thomas Mahler (Ori Dev): Phil Spencer's Strategy of Supporting All Devices is "the right approach"

The problem is that Phil Spencer isn't saying this genuinely. He's doing this out of necessity. It's not like he believes any of this deep down. He's been given marching orders.

Unilateral disarmament for lack of a better phrase as it is so baked into the idea of console wars, will result in a completely different industry.

As a software developer you might not have to worry today about the health of a specific platform, but it is the platform holders responsibility to worry about that not only for today, but for tomorrow.

When all these Xbox games start coming to PS and Switch, the Xbox platform is going to crumble and that will have an impact on the industry. It just will.

I wish people could understand what you're saying here.
 
I still say its only a matter of time before they put all their games on PC
with development budgets like what we saw from the insomniac leak and a largely stagnant console market I don`t think they have any other choice in the long run anyways unless there are major shifts in the market like some AI revolution cutting development times in half or something.
 
How has that played out on the free market? Ps5 is the most successful PS generation ever from a revenue standpoint and nearly all its games are on PC.
tbf, most are time exclusive and port later to PC.

Day one port is another story
 
I dont know, I don't have any idea what their internal numbers are telling them.
there will be substantial losses for Sony, IF a noticeable number of people really goes to PC.
On steam, Sony gets game sales with cuts from steam and.........thats it?

On PS, Sonyy lose PSN subscription sales, MTX sales, platform fees (some devs may stop releasing games on PS due to lower userbase number, eg: xbox)
 
Does he get paid if Microsoft finally put his Ori games on PlayStation? Seems like an odd thing to post about.
 
The right approach for a company that got their asses kicked over decades, and then act like they werent even fighting. Any smaller company without infinite money would have been sega'd a long time ago
 
Well, they won't, and they would be incredibly dumb to do so (porting their games on Xbox, not talking about PC).
PS could go a step further by waiting for MS to scale back Xbox HW and then moving the PS6 away from X86 to an esoteric Sony CPU/GPU.
Return to Kutaragi's strategy of making PS the lead development console that doesn't port easily to other platforms.
MS studios would make games for PS and most of those games wouldn't find their way back to PC, Xbox or Switch.
 
Uh if he can't see the difference between DVDs and video games in this regard, he's fully retarded. What's his next battle, forcing Burger King to sell Big Macs because they're all burgers?

Forcing Apple to run Android apps? They're all smartphones, right? Maybe forcing Netflix and all the other streaming services to have the exact same content regardless of who produced it? They're all streaming services right 🤷‍♂️

Has he heard about competition? If every piece of software worked across all consoles there would be no point in selling them. Sure, people can love PC all they want and hate consoles but for the console manufacturers it sure doesn't make sense.
 
If someone cannot afford a $500 consoles to play their games, they also cannot afford to purchase the games for ANY console.

Paying for a content subscription only rewards those games with the most eyeballs (engagement). it is great for Mr. Mahler because even if one of their games bombs they will get enough on the back end from the millions of downloads and brief engagement from players. This number ONLY applies to established game studios. Finding great new content from fresh developers isn't what gamepass or another subscription is doing. It is funding the most lucrative games on the service to keep the lights on at those studios, to create the same content, and generate more engagement. When everyone is playing on the same filed (same basic hardware according to him) its a race to the bottom (quality wise) to grab player attention.

I realize that Mr. Mahler isn't praising gamepass here (he actually throws a bit of shade with the comment about using a different publisher)...he is praising multi-platform releases and a reduction in the number of exclusive games on a platform. His opinion on exclusives (which he draws a clever parallel to with physical movie media being locked to a player.....pedantic since he is comparing apples to apples where as VHS and DVD offer VERY different value propositions same with the Switch and Xbox) is diluting/ignoring what exclusives actually bring. Innovation and unique game play experiences built on the foundations of the exclusive platform.

I also realize that most players now don't give two shits about any of this. They just want to play what their friends are playing which means Roblox, Fortnite, and whatever other new thing is popular and free.
 
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Phil the kind of guy who scores own goals for his team again and again even though the team is already trailing behind.

And yet he has fans who blame the ball and his team for the own goals.
 
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bold GIF


MS has LOST they know it the whole world knows it this "exclusives are wrong" argument flies in the face of the ENTIRE history of home gaming.
The problem isn't MS (or this dev) saying it, the problem is the gullible fans parroting the same lines.
 
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PHIL SPENCER!!!!! PHIL SPENCER!!!! *CRIES*


I do like how Nintendo is just exempt from this.

This is obvious bullshit. Antitrust just had a big fight with Microsoft because they wanted to buy out the biggest 3rd party publisher. Now that it hasn't worked out for them, they want the same antitrust to change the law.
 
And yes, Nintendo will keep doing their own thing, which is selling 60 millions units of Mario Kart 8 over the course of a generation where they sold 150 millions of their own hardware. And that's definitely OK.

In the meantime, MS will continue to look at these sales numbers and keep dreaming that they one day reach them with an in-house development. And since they don't know how to do this, they will throw away their entire business model to sell on every screen possible to try to make it. But they still won't make it. So they will lower their standards to mobile games, as the public is much larger and much less exigent. But they still won't make it.

So they will do the only thing they know : resort to buying games that already managed to do this, like Minecraft and Call of Duty.

But this still won't be their victory, only a borrowed one. Because in the end, they never understood what matters : good games. Games that people want to play.
 
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I'm old now and rather just enjoy the games. Let me amass a collection and play where I want. If the 3 won't do it then emulation it is.
 
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