Me: Competition puts a stranglehold on 3rd Party Devs

[Rockster]

Been debating whether or not to post something like this for fear of quick degeneration into a PS3 vs XBox vs lazy devs vs lead platforms vs ports fanboy shootout. So mods, just lock if needed.

With some of the controversy surrounding the GTA4 delay, and reports about numerous multiplatform games with versions lagging behind or lacking certain features I wanted to see if people think having multiple successful consoles actually hinders 3rd party game development. While competition is great from a consumer standpoint, does the quality and quantity of 3rd party games suffer by not being able to focus resources, technology, and effort on a dominant platform. I'm not interested in which platforms might be easier or better to develop on, so please don't introduce those comparisons into this discussion.

 

[Skrying]

It is easier to develop for one platform instead of many. I thought this was common sense...

 

[Rockster]

I agree. So what creates the best ecosystem for gamers.
1) A competitive market, where there is no dominant console and you potentially have to own multiple systems to gain access to all the content you are interested in. Where overall quality and quantity of content suffers from developers not being able to truly focus on a single platform. But, where individual console costs may be lower, price reduction schedules escalated, and new features brought to market more aggressively.
2) A monopolistic market, where the majority of the compelling content will be found on a single platform and the odds of needing to own multiple systems reduced. Where 3rd party developers can more consistently exploit the capabilities and features of that system. But, where the lack of market pressure slows innovation and price reductions.

 

[quest55720]

Well a 10+ year monopoly over the console market lead to a 599 dollar console. Competition is best for all gamers IMO. As great as the NES days were when the genesis became a success it was a win for gamers. 2 heavy weights going toe to toe to win over gamers.

My 2 favorite eras 16 bit and PS1 days came about because of a hungery up start up start taking a chunk out of the big dogs.

I already have a great feeling about this generation because of the dethroning of the big dog.

 

[ERP]

It's clearly not as simple as one platform means better games.
With a single platform the platform owner has a great deal of power over 3rd parties. Anyone who developed on the SNES/NES genre could tell you about how difficult it was to deal with Nintendo at the time.

Do you really wany the company controlling the platform to make arbitrary decisions about what's acceptable in games? or arbitrarilly decide to make it economically unviable for 3rd parties to make competitive games by pushing up licensing costs? They have these powers, but competition means that a 3rd party can take the game elsewhere or use that fact as leverage

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It's clearly not as simple as one platform means better games.
With a single platform the platform owner has a great deal of power over 3rd parties. Anyone who developed on the SNES/NES genre could tell you about how difficult it was to deal with Nintendo at the time.

How were Sony in that respect? Seems to me they were very open about what goes on their machine, which is in considerable part to the platform's success. PS2 domination last gen meant one platform served most of my gaming wants with huge diversity and no complexity. Where it lacked features like online, going forward that's not an issue because all the machines are capable.

The anti-monopoly argument tends to point back to bad situations, yet ignores positive. Like anti-monarchy sentiment, that points to the bad kings but ignores all the good ones that really improved things for people. It all depends who's in charge as to whether it works or not. The console environment is like console hardware - each different design will have different pro's and con's. What the open market adds by way of competition, it takes away by way of complication. And what a single platform brings by way of simplified development, it takes away by lack of competition.

There is no right solution. Like governments. The only way to get the best of everything is for the people involved to do the best possible on principle, aiming to supply the best service or product they can, without needing some outside motivation like greed. Then whatever platforms and software is involved, it's the best for the end users because they're the reason for it, rather than the reason being the investors and the bank balance.

 

[Rainbow Man]

It is easier to develop for one platform instead of many. I thought this was common sense...

This isn't neccessarily the caes.

One platform mayhave issues or limitations another is not subject to.

If the Atari VCS had been the only console platform developed for then games would neccessarily have to be very simplistic due to the hardware's limitations.

The NES - whch obviously was a separate platfrom from the VCS - was less limited. But still more limited than the systems that came after it.


So in my opinion the answer is "no". It's nto a hindrance. Actually it's a benefit.

Different platorms bring different abilities and possibilities to the table with regards to price and performance and input methods etc.

That publishers may feel the need to port titles to as many plafroms as possible is entirely their own choice, and if they hit snagsa long the way then perhaps they should look more closely at their own conduct.

P4eace.

 

[ERP]

How were Sony in that respect? Seems to me they were very open about what goes on their machine, which is in considerable part to the platform's success. PS2 domination last gen meant one platform served most of my gaming wants with huge diversity and no complexity. Where it lacked features like online, going forward that's not an issue because all the machines are capable.

The anti-monopoly argument tends to point back to bad situations, yet ignores positive. Like anti-monarchy sentiment, that points to the bad kings but ignores all the good ones that really improved things for people. It all depends who's in charge as to whether it works or not. The console environment is like console hardware - each different design will have different pro's and con's. What the open market adds by way of competition, it takes away by way of complication. And what a single platform brings by way of simplified development, it takes away by lack of competition.

There is no right solution. Like governments. The only way to get the best of everything is for the people involved to do the best possible on principle, aiming to supply the best service or product they can, without needing some outside motivation like greed. Then whatever platforms and software is involved, it's the best for the end users because they're the reason for it, rather than the reason being the investors and the bank balance.

Sony had a predominantly different business model than Nintendo through the PS1/PS2 era, and it's arguably why they were so sucessful. Where Nintendo considers internally developed software as their primary form of income, with 3rd party software license fees a bonus, Sony was entirely dependant on 3rd party Licensing fees early on because of the lack of internal development studios, and built their model around this.

Sony have never been in the position Nintendo was with the NES.

Having siad that IMO Sony have become more and more difficult to deal with as a 3rd party.

As much as I would like to build platform specific games, competition is good, without it Sony wouls have no reason to push the technical envelope and no reason to play nice with 3rd parties.

I also don't believe games suffer all that much anymore from being multiplatform, it certainly doesn't change the game play very much. I think they suffer more from there own complexity and market pressure than anything, the industry still doesn't have a real handle on making large teams efficient, or maintaining Million plus line code bases with radical requirement changes happening on a daily basis.

As an aside one of my current pet peaves is the industries tendancy to grab at any new development paradigm as a possible solution, agile development being the latest. While there are elements of many of these approaches that I find interesting or compelling they often don't work well with the rate of change and sizes of codebase in modern games.

 

[Rockster]

ERP, great points!

 

[PARANOiA]

Having siad that IMO Sony have become more and more difficult to deal with as a 3rd party.

How so? What experience have you had to date, or what specific stories have you heard?

I have heard gossip that Sony became a monster unto themselves... basically, the arrogance they treated the consumer base and competition (Xbox 1.5, 5million sold with no software, only real next gen machine, don't need xyz title any more, Nintendo are for children that will grow up and move to Sony, etc etc) spread to the way they treat their third parties.

This was to an extent an output of their hardware, which required system-specific skills, and even assembler-level code to get good performance! As a developer, the last thing I'd want to know is some extremely specific and non-portable skillset that will be useless in four or five years. I'd also hazard a guess that dev houses didn't really want to have to pay their staff lots of money learning low-level techniques if another platform offered an easier solution through better tools or abstraction.


Anyway, this is all largely theoretical on my part. It seems the industry is very cyclic, with no manufacturer really surviving maintaining the dominant machine in the long term (Atari, Nintendo, Sega, now Sony?) My armchair (or is it computer chair) hypothesis is it moves in simple stages of:

• foot in the door, offer something new with a good reason for devs to jump ship
• kick the enemy when down, use your size and weight to pull some big aces unique to your platform
• become #1, and now you're the household name... when my mum mentions me playing games, she'll use your name ("get off the Atari/Sega/Playstation"regardless of whatever machine is being played
• now you're #1, tell the industry it's time for them to follow your suit, higher dev costs and fees, less support since you're the one they need to follow
• competition steps in with a foot in the door, repeat process

We'll see in a few years, won't we?

Cheers

 

[ninzel]

You know if someone could come up with a solution that perfectly balances the two extremes of the very open PC model,and the closed console model that would be ideal IMO. A hardware standard or standard set up specs,but machines that follow that standard and made by multiple electronics makers like LG,Phillips,Toshiba,Pioneer etc etc.

 

[weaksauce]

Well competition gives better consoles and thus better quality games. Just think of 360, which would have had 256ram if it wasn't for competition, and in turn no UT3 etc.. And if it wasn't for competition, PS3 would be $799, and then what developer would afford to develop for a console with that limited 'base' of customers?

I think developers can afford making games for only one platform. The demand for quality games on any one platform is enough to feed the profit. So, we have like square enix, kojima prod, PD etc, all of which are making quality games for a console that has been pushed through competition to become cheaper and better etc..

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Well competition gives better consoles and thus better quality games. Just think of 360, which would have had 256ram if it wasn't for competition, and in turn no UT3 etc.. And if it wasn't for competition, PS3 would be $799, and then what developer would afford to develop for a console with that limited 'base' of customers?

That's not entirely true. If PS3 was $800, it wouldn't sell. Sony would have to drop the price to sell the product regardless of competition. Competition would likely encourage more aggressive pricing and faster drops, but that in itself isn't the only factor affecting price. If Sony want a viable platform, they'd have to set a price people are going to spend and developers are going to develop for. Look at the current market. The $600 (500) PS3 isn't selling particularly well, but if you lok at the millions of console owners out there, they're not all buying the alternatives. $400 is too much money. $300 is too much money for most. Without any competition, a $600 PS3 still isn't going to sell well, and Sony would have to drop the price eventually.

Competition is not the be all and end all of motivating factors. The market is ultimately the driving factor. You have to set the product price at whatever the market is willing to pay, whether there's a rival or not. Rival's only serve to adjust people's perception of value and willingness to pay at a given pricepoint.

 

[Akumajou]

I have heard gossip that Sony became a monster unto themselves... basically, the arrogance they treated the consumer base and competition (Xbox 1.5, 5million sold with no software, only real next gen machine, don't need xyz title any more, Nintendo are for children that will grow up and move to Sony, etc etc) spread to the way they treat their third parties.

This was to an extent an output of their hardware, which required system-specific skills, and even assembler-level code to get good performance! As a developer, the last thing I'd want to know is some extremely specific and non-portable skillset that will be useless in four or five years. I'd also hazard a guess that dev houses didn't really want to have to pay their staff lots of money learning low-level techniques if another platform offered an easier solution through better tools or abstraction.

Sorry but Sony's trash talking is no different than Nintendo trash talking like when they were talking about "quality over quantity" and that "Final Fantasy players in Japan lock themselves in a room to play", no different than any claims made about SNES, N64 and maybe even GameCube, no different than SEGA trash talking from Genesis/MegaDrive, Sega CD, Saturn, Dreamcast or any wild claims made back then. However one thing I can clearly see is that everyone is very much focusing on Sony's claims as of the PS3 and later it having its issues in the market hopefully those writting those blogs and articles online or in print magazines are not subject to being fans of any particular console or company.

I do want to know though what "extremely specific non-portable skillset that will be useless in four or five years" are you refering to as being useless specially if the console life cycle and installed base will allow you to benefit.

Can we agree to look back and see that the PS1's lifecycle provided rewards to those devs and later the PS2's lifecycle is still providing rewards for game devs that chose that "platform specific" path. However the same cannot be said of Microsoft since they apparently did not plan out of proper contract for XBox 1. SEGAs platforms were yielding high profits and their games were selling until the prematurely pulled the plug on their own consoles or in the case of DC, had no choice but to do it so as not to get clobbered by XBox's specs.

And if it wasn't for competition, PS3 would be $799, and then what developer would afford to develop for a console with that limited 'base' of customers?

I think that the only honest answer to this without sounding like I am defending Sony is that without competition from Microsoft's XBox 1 specs and later XBox 360 specs, Sony would more than likely not bothered to introduce the PS3 when it did.

I am pretty confident in saying that without that competition, Sony would have likely announced PS3 by E3 2007 with a console lauch in 08 and since I am speculating on a speculation the price of the console would most likely reflect the technology being put into it. However taking into account all the greatness that PS2 achieved for the DVD format medium and knowing that Blu Ray would be in their best interests the most I could say would be to go one year earlier while taking into account that Microsoft's X360 and Halo 3 following really accellerated the development/launch of PS3 and perhaps a entry level BR player.

And btw I really don't think that Nvidia's G80 GPU or even a custom version of it would have been of benefit to PS3 or Sony as it would have only created problems given the current technological limits, unless it was a 2008 launch with a 65nm process.

Been debating whether or not to post something like this for fear of quick degeneration into a PS3 vs XBox vs lazy devs vs lead platforms vs ports fanboy shootout. So mods, just lock if needed.

With some of the controversy surrounding the GTA4 delay, and reports about numerous multiplatform games with versions lagging behind or lacking certain features I wanted to see if people think having multiple successful consoles actually hinders 3rd party game development. While competition is great from a consumer standpoint, does the quality and quantity of 3rd party games suffer by not being able to focus resources, technology, and effort on a dominant platform. I'm not interested in which platforms might be easier or better to develop on, so please don't introduce those comparisons into this discussion.

I believe it does actually hinder 3rd party game development.

As controversial as the delay in GTA4 or even its development of being a multiplatform game shows that the game dev is more interested in money this time by attempting to monopolize two console audiences. Looking back at GTAIII being released on PS2 things were obviously different back then but in the end Take 2/Rockstar was able to deliver a game that given the PS2's retail market existance (far more months than PS3) GTAIII was able to meet its deadline of release.

The big difference now is that Take 2/Rockstar would not know of any possible competition coming up to challenge their game. Pretty much all GTA clones have failed in terms of exceeding what GTA offered, even though some of those games offered some great features like the fighting in True Crime series and custom character in Saints Row. That said, the possible Saints Row 2 was delayed or announced to be and "True Crime series" afaik is dead as was its attempt at trying to do the same thing GTA 4 is doing but without the GTA name to back it up.

The other thing that needs to be taken into consideration is that GTA created a huge following on Sony's PS2 platform, the game was later ported to XBox but the real question is how much did it actually sell on that platform and how big is its audience compared to the one on PS2 and in my opinion Take 2/Rockstar may have made a mistake in trying to offer their game that for the first time would offer a new in house game engine.

With PS3 you have early adopters buying the console, but early adopters or hardcore Sony fans or any console fans will buy the console based on the games they are expecting to play. You have a legion of GTA III/VC/SA audience created on PS2 and many of these same people who bought GTA may and are most likely not to have purchased a PS3 yet because of price reasons or whatever, but all they really need is a reason to buy the console, reguardless of price complaints.

The real controversy however with GTA4 is the so called money Microsoft invested to give Rockstar for GTA4 features on XBox 360, this is where the real controversy starts, not so much that it was delayed but that money was handed over by a company fully aware of what GTA4 could do for game console sales.

To me this is amazingly ridiculous that Microsoft could not have done this back when "True Crime" was in its conceptual form as MS could really have used, maybe not purchased but "used the services" of the 3rd party to focus all their effor on the XBox 1.

If GTA 4 however were exclusive to PS3 I don't think its fair to say that it would not be delayed as anything could happen but at least the game would most likely have cost the company less money than making in two consoles and the game would have generated sales and prompted that huge GTA audience that was created on PS2, those who needed a reason to spend the money to get a PS3, to go ahead and do so as you know holiday sales generate console sales and games even more console sales.

After all consoles. specially new ones will always be expensive but its the games and the sequels of certain games that drives the sales of the console in question.

 

[PARANOiA]

Sorry but Sony's trash talking is no different than Nintendo trash talking like when they were talking about "quality over quantity" and that "Final Fantasy players in Japan lock themselves in a room to play", no different than any claims made about SNES, N64 and maybe even GameCube, no different than SEGA trash talking from Genesis/MegaDrive, Sega CD, Saturn, Dreamcast or any wild claims made back then. However one thing I can clearly see is that everyone is very much focusing on Sony's claims as of the PS3 and later it having its issues in the market hopefully those writting those blogs and articles online or in print magazines are not subject to being fans of any particular console or company.

I wholeheartedly agree - it's pretty silly to see Sony repeat the same mistakes that made people think Nintendo were so foolish, isn't it? In fact, if you read my whole post, you may even see a point about this being cyclic unto itself.

I do want to know though what "extremely specific non-portable skillset that will be useless in four or five years" are you refering to as being useless specially if the console life cycle and installed base will allow you to benefit.

I guess that's where we differ - I did say that the skills will be useless at the end of the machine's life-cycle. If you feel it's worth the dev's time to learn all sorts of trickery to achieve maximum performance, basically forcing them to down an exclusive path due to the additional constraints this places on a title, we really won't agree here. Good to know you do think it's worthwhile, though.

Can we agree to look back and see that the PS1's lifecycle provided rewards to those devs and later the PS2's lifecycle is still providing rewards for game devs that chose that "platform specific" path. However the same cannot be said of Microsoft since they apparently did not plan out of proper contract for XBox 1. SEGAs platforms were yielding high profits and their games were selling until the prematurely pulled the plug on their own consoles or in the case of DC, had no choice but to do it so as not to get clobbered by XBox's specs.

I think it's fairly easy to see Xbox-developed titles as a strong introduction to Direct X for lots of console-specific developers. Specifically, the tools used for the Xbox are probably the most portable on any machine... since they can be transferred directly to the PC! On the other hand, there haven't really been too many strong PS2 -> PC ports (or simultaneous developed titles) simply because the skills aren't portable. As a business model obviously it makes more sense to go where the market works the best. As a gaming purist, you can argue till you're blue in the face that "Sony platform specific" efforts reaped good results - which they did - but I'd be surprised to see anything that wasn't able to be done easier on a competitors hardware and toolkit.

I hope you're not mistaken in what I'm trying to say. I'm not trying to "trash talk Sony"... we're having a discussion here. I'm simply stating that the effort to reward ratio on PS2 (and definitely PS3) has always been fairly low, and Sony have been able to deal with this by being number one. Now they are not (yet? unlikely this gen at all of course) and they probably need a "Nintendo-style" shape-up to get their house in order. If anything, it's done Nintendo huge favours, since I doubt they'd be where they were today if the N64 wasn't seen as a distant second.

Cheers

 

[Akumajou]

I guess that's where we differ - I did say that the skills will be useless at the end of the machine's life-cycle. If you feel it's worth the dev's time to learn all sorts of trickery to achieve maximum performance, basically forcing them to down an exclusive path due to the additional constraints this places on a title, we really won't agree here. Good to know you do think it's worthwhile, though.

I do agree that the skills would be "useless" at the end of the console life-cycle since alot of that hardware specific coding is going to do no good on the newer console, then again there are those 3rd party devs that will prefer to once again follow that path because their skills will not be limited, assuming their programmers are skilled enough, the main additional constraints you seem to worry about seem to be that the game will be harder to port to another platform, then again what is the point of making the game? Now I am not saying that the game should be exclusive, that decision should be analyzed by the game dev but its pretty obvious that in the console world you just cannot expect game A to look and be the same in a competing console that does not share the hardware specs, because they are competitors.

I think it's fairly easy to see Xbox-developed titles as a strong introduction to Direct X for lots of console-specific developers. Specifically, the tools used for the Xbox are probably the most portable on any machine... since they can be transferred directly to the PC! On the other hand, there haven't really been too many strong PS2 -> PC ports (or simultaneous developed titles) simply because the skills aren't portable. As a business model obviously it makes more sense to go where the market works the best. As a gaming purist, you can argue till you're blue in the face that "Sony platform specific" efforts reaped good results - which they did - but I'd be surprised to see anything that wasn't able to be done easier on a competitors hardware and toolkit.

Alright, XBox to PC porting is an obvious path as reguardless of the hardware the game development tool rules were set up by a company that shares an operating system and an API tool set as its also obvious that PC is going to have to be running a Microsoft Windows OS that meets the requirements to play the ported game. Basically the agenda is obvious, just as obvious as the console being called XBox, after Direct X.

And no you cannot expect strong PS2 -> PC ports, there is an obvious programming wall there and personally I never saw the point for any major traditionaly console game devs to expect to "port" their games to the PC platform and I never really cared as it mostly seemed as a way to gain a new gaming audience to eventually go and get the console for true plug and play without having to worry about some wide spread computer virus to wreck their PC gaming platform in the worst case scenario without having to go into having to purchase more ram, a more capable graphics component, etc.

Also I don't want to add insult to injury to PC gaming, but PC gaming has not been in the best at generating profits unless that game was point and click based (historically to recent) all of the huge selling console hit games are not going to translate into a "huge selling console to PC port" it has taken a major revamping and Microsoft to initiate their "Games for Windows" program that are really intending to be used/played in a Windows Vista enviroment despite all of the problems that os is reported to have. In the end it really is hard for even a game dev to rationalize that with all of these initial problems they are going to expect people to buy these ports when piracy is so rampant killing a huge percentage of possible profits.

At the end of the day we come to this, is a 3rd party dev's choice or decision to make their game multiplatform going to hurt/limit/hinder game development and increase the alleged delays as one game is not complete or on a another platform its running at half the speed of the first.

The other problem that may not be mentioned and may even be very controversial is the "actual installed base" of these consoles, on Sony PS3, the install base is barely some 8 months old and are low in numbers of consoles sold, but lets be fair to Sony here, they only have one Holiday season under their belt and that was their hardware launch, this coming holiday season will prove if gamers are willing to step up to PS3 and thereby grant them more console sales or go to the other consoles due to the price issues.

Microsoft's XBox 360 has claimed and according to the NPD reports over 11 million consoles sold aka user install base. The reality is did those $399 consoles get actually sold or is there something not being taken into account.

I seem to remember last spring/summer while watching one of MTVs reality competition programs that for nearly every significant event the participants were being awarded Premium XBox 360s, clearly MTV's show is very much a minor number of systems but can those consoles count to the instal base?

There are other countless and numerous online/offline, tv related or print magazine related contests, giveaways that one of the prizes was again a Premium XBox 360, again this can be considered minor as well but can those consoles account to the instal base? This may be a problem with Sony as I really have seen much fewer PS3 giveaways in their case.

Finally there is the very much reported console hardware failiure of XBox 360 consoles alot of these consoles started getting media coverage way back after the launch of the XBox 360 and up until Microsoft's extension of their warranty to 3 years the install base world wide was the 11 million plus number. The question is there were many people who were able to save their receipts and exchange their systems via MS refurbished/repaired consoles but there are also a number of people we do not know about, those people who may have purchased the console, lost their receipt and instead of calling up MS, they ended up purchasing a new XBox console.

Basically a developer will really have to believe that number of instal base consoles while developing their game only to find out when the game hits retail just how many people will actually be buying their game and we will find out just how will GTA4 sell accross both consoles next year.

This is one of the many problems alot of 3rd parties are going to be facing when chossing to have their game go multiplatform, amazingly their best bet is to make games on Nintendo's Wii console given the wild fire like sales of the console, sure it does not have the specs and sure it does not have the Microsoft friendly API tools to later port "easily" to PC but then again should a 3rd party really care when that new Nintendo console is going to catch up to Microsoft's XBox 360 lead and later leave it behind in terms of consoles sales?

I was also going to talk about gaming audience and expand on what I mentioned but really if game devs don't use that as a factor and all they see is "install base" equals "sales" equals PC port then those game devs are going to be facing alot of finalcial losses in my humble opinion.

 

[weaksauce]

That's not entirely true. If PS3 was $800, it wouldn't sell. Sony would have to drop the price to sell the product regardless of competition. Competition would likely encourage more aggressive pricing and faster drops, but that in itself isn't the only factor affecting price. If Sony want a viable platform, they'd have to set a price people are going to spend and developers are going to develop for. Look at the current market. The $600 (500) PS3 isn't selling particularly well, but if you lok at the millions of console owners out there, they're not all buying the alternatives. $400 is too much money. $300 is too much money for most. Without any competition, a $600 PS3 still isn't going to sell well, and Sony would have to drop the price eventually.

They aren't buying because there are alternative consoles to Sony's... What I'm saying is, PS3 as it is today, would not have come with the same price at the same specs without pressure from competition, nor would 360 have, which is more or less confirmed... It certanly wouldn't had been better, and since console performance put's the limit on how good a game can be, developers would have been more limited wthout competition. And developing for one console is possible for a high quality developer. Some are just greedy and sacrifice quality for quantity of customer base.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

They aren't buying because there are alternative consoles to Sony's... What I'm saying is, PS3 as it is today, would not have come with the same price at the same specs without pressure from competition, nor would 360 have.

That's true, and one of the pluses to competition. Without it, the products would be less feature/hardware rich. Although they would progress in order to sell new products when the market tires of the existing ones. Lack of competition would slow things down (and some might argue that's not a bad thing, but few people on this board!)

 

[infinity4]

competition was bad for me in some ways, in my opinion. it made microsoft to rush their hardware by like a year, they just had to do it because sony had large market share. and we all know about issues with X360. i personally wanted them to launch it like October 2006/February 2007, so that they would have more stronger launch line up as well as more being able to root out reliability problems before launch. and i am sure if microsoft launched late R* would have more time to work on GTA IV, relating to this thread.
But its my perception, i am sure some wanted next gen as early as possible, i am sure reliability issues aren't as serious as i currently feel.

 

[quest55720]

competition was bad for me in some ways, in my opinion. it made microsoft to rush their hardware by like a year, they just had to do it because sony had large market share. and we all know about issues with X360. i personally wanted them to launch it like October 2006/February 2007, so that they would have more stronger launch line up as well as more being able to root out reliability problems before launch. and i am sure if microsoft launched late R* would have more time to work on GTA IV, relating to this thread.
But its my perception, i am sure some wanted next gen as early as possible, i am sure reliability issues aren't as serious as i currently feel.

And MS would of gotten their asses handed to them launching the same time as sony and nintendo. That year head start was nessasary and has paid off big time. MS has secured with the exception of MGS4/FF13 almost every former sony exclusive. That year head start is the only reason that happened. It was not till 360 3rd parties were seeing million sellers did others follow. Since about the time dead rising came out the 360 developer support has been incredible. With out the head start it would of been the ps2 vs xbox1 all over again with sony having almost every good 3rd party game as an exclusive of some sort.