How to sell next-gen consoles, Marketing, Positioning, and Pricing [2020]

If you're going to be talking about something at least be correct about it. The misrepresentation leads to FUD.

BTW, Microsoft said their first-party games would be cross-gen for the next year. Other studios/devs are free to launch exclusive games. That's a pretty good distinction no?

Tommy McClain

That's exactly what I said "Microsoft isn't going to release any next gen only game in the launch window"

Edit: removed a sentence where I was being petty. I apologise I've been on edge lately.
 
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No they were not.

Jim Ryan said Sony wasn't going to force the dev teams to make games for the Playstation 4, like Microsoft is doing. Sony is not forcing developers to release games on the Playstation 4.
Ratchet and Clank very obviously can't run on a PS4, therefore Jim Ryan did not lie.

Where did anyone from Sony ever said they were going to stop making games for the PS4, and how does that even make sense?

I can't tell people who are misled to shut up, but I can very well tell people they are not being mislead. They're only being mislead by some imaginary senseless promise they somehow believe Sony did to them, or worse: some ambulance chasers convinced them of such.

Honestly, Horizon Forbidden West is the dead last game people should be complaining about. The game is gorgeous and doesn't look like anything we've ever seen this generation.
Complaining that a game doesn't look good is valid (e.g. this latest Sands of Time remake). Complaining that a game that looks great is coming to an inferior platform is the same as complaining about Doom or Witcher on the Switch. It's just senseless gatekeeping.

I'm pretty sure many people commented that Miles Morales looked just like Spiderman. That one being able to run on the PS4 should have surprised no one IMO.
Can you find me a single journalist that reported to expect all these titles would show up on PS4 prior to yesterday? Not a single forum member here or anywhere else has made that claim. No one was even talking like this was a thing. Not saying anything about it and failing to fix an incorrect narrative until the day of pre-orders is not considered misleading?

The first person to report this is Geoff Keighly? Really? Not even Sony themselves wanted to acknowledge this.

Just type Horizon Forbidden West PS4 and see how many articles popped up about it now suddenly showing up on PS4.
https://www.techradar.com/news/horizon-2-forbidden-west-ps5-release-date-trailer

^^^ you can say you're the best at knowing what's going to happen or whatever, but the majority of the population were no way clued in that this was going to happen. You wouldn't have editorial after editorial that this was not known until now.
 
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I don't know what I don't know.


Like I said, you can say hey stupid wake up, or that some people got misled. No one expected here HZD and SM:MM to be cross gen. Some of the other titles sure, but not these two.
Now, even with GoW, will it be cross gen as well. It may very well be.

So, I don't think people expected 100% exclusive, but they were sold on the big hitters being that. To drive adoption to the new consoles to sell new experiences etc.

SONY's 10 million games may still go cross-gen in 2021, but their other million sellers

such as Ratchent and Clank are already PS5 exclusive and has the next-gen design.

Sony doesn't mislead us. I agree some would think they play it safe and are not that aggressive.




No they were not.

Jim Ryan said Sony wasn't going to force the dev teams to make games for the Playstation 4, like Microsoft is doing. Sony is not forcing developers to release games on the Playstation 4.
Ratchet and Clank very obviously can't run on a PS4, therefore Jim Ryan did not lie.

Where did anyone from Sony ever said they were going to stop making games for the PS4, and how does that even make sense?

I can't tell people who are misled to shut up, but I can very well tell people they are not being mislead. They're only being mislead by some imaginary senseless promise they somehow believe Sony did to them, or worse: some ambulance chasers convinced them of such.

Honestly, Horizon Forbidden West is the dead last game people should be complaining about. The game is gorgeous and doesn't look like anything we've ever seen this generation.
Complaining that a game doesn't look good is valid (e.g. this latest Sands of Time remake). Complaining that a game that looks great is coming to an inferior platform is the same as complaining about Doom or Witcher on the Switch. It's just stupid.
There are different ways to make cross-gen games.


1. Graphically different games: Like Dragon Quest 11 PS4 vs 3DS (Yes, cross two generations).
They only share the same story, the same background setting, but basically SquareEnix builds
two different games and different game stages.



2. Changing game play mechanism:
For example PS4 Battlefield 4 supports 64 people while PS3 version only supports 24 people.



3. Scaling: including resolution, frame-rate, graphic effect.


We can see how Horizon 2 does. For example, if Horizon 2 has different map design between PS5 and PS4 then it may also deliver true next-gen experience.
The graphic fidelity of Horizon 2 makes me think the game does much more additional features than just scaling from PS4 version.
 
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Enough with the lies. Microsoft is not forcing devs to make last-gen games.
Microsoft isn't either. More FUD.

EDIT: BRiT beat me to it.

Tommy McClain

Yeah sure, check out this totally questionable news source called news.xbox.com:

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/07/16/players-first-you-are-the-future-of-gaming/

Phil Spencer- Head of Xbox and known spreader of FUD said:
You won’t be forced into the next generation. We want every Xbox player to play all the new games from Xbox Game Studios. That’s why Xbox Game Studios titles we release in the next couple of years—like Halo Infinite—will be available and play great on Xbox Series X and Xbox One. We won’t force you to upgrade to Xbox Series X at launch to play Xbox exclusives.

https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news...ame-studios-matt-booty-on-the-future-of-xbox/

Matt Booty- Head of Xbox Game Studios and spreader of FUD said:
As our content comes out over the next year, two years, all of our games, sort of like PC, will play up and down that family of devices,” Booty explains. “We want to make sure that if someone invests in Xbox between now and [Series X] that they feel that they made a good investment and that we’re committed to them with content.


https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...ries-x-developers-being-held-back-by-xbox-one
Phil Spencer- also known as Grand FUD-Spreader said:
That said, we're shipping Xbox Series X this year. I'm playing it every day at home, and it is different to playing on an Xbox One X. We should applaud the work that is going on with the SSD, and the work that is going on with audio, to pick some of the areas that Jim [Ryan] and Mark [Cerny] and the stuff that [PlayStation] is focused on. We should applaud load times and fidelity of scenes and framerate and input latency, and all of these things that we've focused on with the next generation. But that should not exclude people from being able to play. That's our point. How do we create an ecosystem where if you want to play an Xbox game, we're going to give you a way to go play it?



I agree, enough with the lies.
I think you guys should send these two rumor mongers an e-mail telling them how wrong they are about Xbox games.
 
Yeah sure, check out this totally questionable news source called news.xbox.com:

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/07/16/players-first-you-are-the-future-of-gaming/



https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news...ame-studios-matt-booty-on-the-future-of-xbox/




https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...ries-x-developers-being-held-back-by-xbox-one




I agree, enough with the lies.
I think you guys should send these two rumor mongers an e-mail telling them how wrong they are about Xbox games.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/ph...hether-or-not-to-make-games-cross-gen.249963/

They weren't forced to to make cross gen titles. They chose to make them cross gen. MS marketed it being cross gen friendly as a result and got smashed for having unclear messaging. How OG Xbox will hold them back.

Even the a huge xbox proponent eventually caved to this narrative

in which everyone championed Playstation for taking the hard cut route.

Not a single journalist knew this was coming
 
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Well I don't know of which first party game of there's is coming out during the launch window.

You haven't defined the "launch window", but now it's just first-party too. So a 2nd or 3rd party game doesn't count even it's Series X|S only? LOL Let's define such a small criteria such that MS can't possibly win. LOL

Tommy McClain
 
Here's the separate thread about it @ToTTenTranz -- https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/that-cross-generation-games-thread-2020-spawn.61889/#post-2140626

About that Microsoft Games Studios cross-gen Statement from Phil Spencer. It is not a mandate. It's up to each respective developer to decide for themselves, even within Xbox Game Studios.


The thing you'll see on the 23rd is we're giving our studios real creative freedom to build the games that they envision.

As you know we've added a lot of studios to the to the Xbox Game Studios organization over the last few years and providing them the financial stability, the creative freedom to go build the games that they want to go build, and our game creators want to build great games that can reach a large audience of players.

So I think what you hear Matt talking about and what our creators will say is we have a vision for every game that we're building and the vision starts with the player, not the device. If a creator comes to us and says 'No, I really want to focus on next generation' with their games, we're completely open to that and we're very supportive of that.

If a creator comes to us and says I have this vision for reaching these customers across different platforms and different generations we're completely supportive of that.

It is really about our creators having choice and allowing them to build the games that they want to build to reach the audience that they're looking for and not things that we're mandating to our creators in terms of what they have to go do.

It's not our rules for our platform it's more about creators creating the games that they want to go build looking ahead.
 
You haven't defined the "launch window", but now it's just first-party too. So a 2nd or 3rd party game doesn't count even it's Series X|S only? LOL Let's define such a small criteria such that MS can't possibly win. LOL

Tommy McClain

What else would I mean when I say Microsoft other than first or second party?
Is there a next gen only game published by Microsoft? I'm honestly asking.

Regarding launch window I wouldn't know I wasn't being scientific, let's say 6 months?
 
Only 18 of them? Assuming you're talking about the PS+ Collection.

Surely there are far more best PS4 games than that, right?

Quality not quantity. Those are deffo some of the best PS4 games. But yeah, it's not *all* games. :p
 
:yes:
But they are! SMH

Tommy McClain
God I hate these acronyms.
What game is SMH?
Can we agree that if a game hasn't been discussed in some recent posts in the thread, the full name would be used instead of an acronym.

Edit: oh, I guess it means Shaking My Head :yep2:
 
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Quality not quantity. Those are deffo some of the best PS4 games. But yeah, it's not *all* games. :p

I was just surprised they cut the list that low. I thought they would easily have it stretch out further, to like 54 or so, but that would be an amazing 3 free games per month for 18 months. Or even being for 24 months would hit 48, meaning 2 amazing games per month. Probably too much value to give away? :cool:
 
Yeah sure, check out this totally questionable news source called news.xbox.com:

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/07/16/players-first-you-are-the-future-of-gaming/



https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news...ame-studios-matt-booty-on-the-future-of-xbox/




https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...ries-x-developers-being-held-back-by-xbox-one




I agree, enough with the lies.
I think you guys should send these two rumor mongers an e-mail telling them how wrong they are about Xbox games.

I'd expect there are many games from MS Studios well into development (1 year +) right now that will end up being next-gen exclusives on console. Titles in the launch window would have started development 3, 4, even 5 years ago. Within that time you can make a game that will be able to be enjoyed by a small audience upon release or you can make one that will instantly be accessible to a much larger audience on release. If, as a platform holder, you're not too bothered about incentivizing purchases of your new console via exclusives and instead choose to rely on the capability of the hardware alone to sell itself, why does it make sense to do the former?
 
I was just surprised they cut the list that low. I thought they would easily have it stretch out further, to like 54 or so, but that would be an amazing 3 free games per month for 18 months. Or even being for 24 months would hit 48, meaning 2 amazing games per month. Probably too much value to give away? :cool:

Definitely, yeah. PS Plus is cheap, it's the equivalent of Xbox Gold (if it's still called that). I'm definitely going to be playing some of those that I missed out on. It's a serious bargain if they're on the normal Plus membership.
 
Can you find me a single journalist that reported to expect all these titles would show up on PS4 prior to yesterday?
All these titles? All these 2 (two) titles?
Out of the 10 1st-party games announced for the PS5?


The first person to report this is Geoff Keighly? Really? Not even Sony themselves wanted to acknowledge this.
So what's your theory here?
Sony was trying to hide the PS4 of Horizon 2? From whom? You think they were afraid of not filling up the pre-orders? You think Sony was being dishonest about the existence of Horizon 2 on the PS4 because that would be motive for a significant number of people not wanting to buy a PS5?
Is this the theory?

Geoff Keighly is a very popular gaming journalist / presenter who breaks gaming-relate news about everything. He broke the news about PS4 Horizon 2 just as he broke the news about retailers getting ahead of themselves with pre-orders.
He's the first person to report on a lot of stuff.



About that Microsoft Games Studios cross-gen Statement from Phil Spencer. It is not a mandate. It's up to each respective developer to decide for themselves, even within Xbox Game Studios.
So they spend half a year saying all games will be available on the XBone for at least two years, all while getting criticized for that, and suddenly it's not a mandate. It's just that all developers chose to make their games on 4 different consoles at the same time.
So when he writes, one week before that interview:
Phil Spencer said:
We want every Xbox player to play all the new games from Xbox Game Studios. That’s why Xbox Game Studios titles we release in the next couple of years—like Halo Infinite—will be available and play great on Xbox Series X and Xbox One.
Who's "we"? Every studio director living in different countries / continents having the exact same opinion about having to make their games on 4 different consoles?
I wonder what Tim Longo has to say about that. It sure sounds like he's saying "we" the executives, not "we" the developers/directors (mainly because he isn't one).
Regardless, this isn't the thread for that.



Definitely, yeah. PS Plus is cheap, it's the equivalent of Xbox Gold (if it's still called that). I'm definitely going to be playing some of those that I missed out on. It's a serious bargain if they're on the normal Plus membership.
I'll be surprised if the Plus price doesn't increase this year - again.
 
Well there is still the rumor Xbox Gold is going free, or not needed for multiplayer. Curious when/if that hits and what Sony will do in reaction. Not sure if Gold goes away entirely or remains for some perks.
 
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