A little while back we reported that Sony had bashed Microsoft’s publishing policies saying that Microsoft is “protecting inferior technology” by not allowing multiplatform games to be published on the Xbox 360 if it doesn’t have at least the same features across all platforms. This week Mel Kirk, Zen Studios’ vice president of marketing and public relations, has fired back and said that the bashing of Microsoft is not fair. Check out the details below.

Microsoft has very strict policies for the publishing of games on the Xbox 360 platform; any multiplatform game needs to be released “at least” at the same time across all platforms and must have the same features on the Xbox as on any other platform. Sony’s vice president of publisher relations Rob Dyer said that this was meant to protect an “inferior technology” and that you wouldn’t find those kinds of practices at Sony. Check here for the full article on what Sony had to say about Microsoft’s publishing policies.

Today, Mel Kirk, the vice president of marketing and public relations at Zen Studios, has stood up and backed Microsoft saying that the policies are a legitimate gatekeeper of quality content and that the bashing of Microsoft, in general, is not fair when the issues with other platforms, specifically the PSN, are not looked at. Here is what he had to say.

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"It's their [Microsoft's] culture. Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft all have very different cultures. Microsoft has a very specific way of managing Xbox Live Arcade. It makes for a more successful platform for everybody who gets a game up there. Those things are in place to as a real gatekeeper for quality content. I'll be perfectly honest, you're going to do better on XBLA than you will on PSN. The policies they have in place really enable that. They don't stifle creativity because, you look like a game like Pinball FX, we did some groundbreaking things there for a free-to-play with in-app purchasing game on console. They let us take those risks. They were there. They wanted to work and help us develop them even further and gave us a lot of good input on that. That just hasn't been our experience. If they're [Microsoft] holding back features in games because they can't do what PlayStation does, I would agree with you. But I really don't understand that. Is there an actual specific title we can talk about? If we're going to give Microsoft a hard time, especially recently, with other things Sony said about them trying to inhibit creativity because they don't have powerful enough tech to do things and their technology is lacklustre, if we're going to focus on all these things then we need to then look across the board at everyone and criticise everything. It just doesn't seem fair to be lopsided one way or the other."
It seems that the comments Dyer made did not cite a specific time when a game was not published on Xbox because the system couldn’t keep up with a feature that was available on the Playstation 3. It seems that Kirk does not like the fact that there has been a seemingly steady stream of Microsoft bashing in the past few weeks and there haven’t been any specifics cited. To keep his side of the story in check with what he was saying, Kirk cited a time when the Playstation Network caused trouble for his company.

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"When PSN went down, of course it was a huge story. But then the fallout from that got taken away. E3 came and it was all gone and forgotten about. We missed two releases in the PSN outage. Then there was a lot of talking between account managers. Hey, when do you guys want to release? Here are potential dates. We were like, oh man, this is really good, and we'll know when we're coming out and it's not going to be so bad. But the Thursday night before E3, all of the games just got released. Anybody that missed their date got pushed out and was published. We found out about it over Twitter and Facebook. Hey! Fantastic Four is available! We were like, what? Totally caught by surprise. It was hard for us to figure that one out. We've talked about it. We have good dialogue about it. They're not exactly apologetic. They're like, OK, next time - hopefully there's not a next time - we'll try to do it differently. We're happy with that."
Now, I know that the PSN outage has been covered ad nauseam in the past but this is one element that I never really saw covered myself. While this isn’t exactly the same kind of problem that Sony is talking about, it is still something that should be considered before we go after Microsoft with the pitchforks. It seems that at least one (and I’m sure many other) publishers are happy with the level of support and the gatekeeping policies that are in place at Microsoft. There is no question that Xbox Live is the more popular online platform and there must be a good reason for that.

While it is not very fair to bash one side without pointing out the flaws on the other side, Microsoft’s policies still seems a little unfair. Kirk seems to also agree that the policies are unfair if they hold back features from games because they can’t be done on the Xbox but let’s see a specific example before we take sides. I’m sure there is one, so it would be nice to know that these aren’t unfounded claims at worst or, at best, “what if” scenario claims.

Either way, it seems that neither company is perfect (who is?) but, as Kirk pointed out, the culture for each company is different. The different cultures lead to different business practices and different outcomes for gamers and publishers alike. Whether we like it or not, the company still has the right to cultivate its own unique area of business and how a company does that is up to them.

What do you think of this whole scenario? Is the Microsoft bashing unfair or is it based in the truth? Do we need specific examples to launch an attack or is the overarching policy enough?

http://gamergaia.com/home/gaming-news/45-industrial/1870-zen-studios-believes-sonys-bashing-of-microsoft-policies-to-be-be-qunfairq-.html

Posted: Sep 16, 2011 7:34 pm