What was the last exclusive first party game MS announced? Because Sony announced two just last week. I don't care how many times Phil Spencer says "trust me", I don't count that as good "communication".
All their new exclusive announcements happened at E3 last year. Which includes both Gears and Halo Infinite.
In 2 months time, I expect a lot more. He's not wrong, they're coming. They wait for E3 to make major announcements.
I'm not as caught up on exclusives as others though.
I love playing 3P games. The fact that I know Division 2 will work on NextBox right now, is a good thing. I know Division will support 3 years of service, so that carries over without me having to do anything at all.
I know that I won't have to buy new controllers, which is lovely since they push custom controllers, and with knowing those controllers are carrying forward they can buy these controllers today. And I can expect to play all the new exclusives on GamePass with a hefty amount of 3P titles as well. That's massive because as a consumer of their products it saves me a significant amount of money that I would have to spend otherwise.
Being able to plan like this is beneficial to me. I'm still not understanding
how not communicating is beneficial for the customer.
I don't see a negative issue with announcing BC early for PS4 players. It gives them peace of mind to buy digital titles moving into PS5. They can build their library now moving to next gen knowing how it will be supported. And equally it's not like Sony can announce a better more robust BC service than Xbox has already, so why not just announce the feature for the sake of supporting their own players? I don't see this as entitlement either.
How is this different from when Sony announced tons of exclusives back in 2015/2016 which didn't come out until 3-4 years later. If they're announcing titles that early to try to draw the crowds to make purchases on Sony's platform earlier before titles are released, then why wait on these features then?
As a customer, if you're asking me to make purchasing decisions today, and in the near future my decisions could be impacted by next year because of next gen, then why penalize me for it?
There's no obvious pattern here that I can see in which Sony chooses to announce things and chooses not to announce except one;
They announce when their direction is solid, like every other company does.
Thus the only thing that makes sense to me is that if they haven't announced anything concerning platform features, they are either not working on it, or far from delivering it.