Third Party Software Exclusivity Practices

Sony has owned the film rights to Spider-Man and 900 related Marvel Comics characters since 1998, and can keep them if it releases a new "Spider-Man" movie every five years and nine months.
https://www.businessinsider.com/sonys-spider-man-deal-with-disney-and-marvel-studios-explained-2019-8#:~:text=Sony has owned the film,five years and nine months.

unfortunately this is paywalled. let me find another.

A leaked document

Mmm I though it was 3 years. But yes, either they make a movie or lose the rights.
 
Mmm I though it was 3 years. But yes, either they make a movie or lose the rights.
I don't know if the terms were changed when Disney bought Marvel. It sounds like they had to renegotiate new terms when Disney bought Marvel, but I'm unsure.
 
I don't know if the terms were changed when Disney bought Marvel. It sounds like they had to renegotiate new terms when Disney bought Marvel, but I'm unsure.

Why would they? Sony owns Spidey and all characters associated with the Spidey universe, in the movie world.

Disney/Marvel Studios have to ask Sony for permission to use Spidey in their MCU movies.

And to this day, the Spider-Man movies (even with the new MCU Spidey), Venom etc are Sony movies.

Maybe there is an expiry date to the deal but from all the evidence I can see, Sony can keep doing their thing without a care in the world. They just know that being connected to the MCU will make them more money, so of course they will collaborate. But they don’t have to.
 
Why would they? Sony owns Spidey and all characters associated with the Spidey universe, in the movie world.

Disney/Marvel Studios have to ask Sony for permission to use Spidey in their MCU movies.

And to this day, the Spider-Man movies (even with the new MCU Spidey), Venom etc are Sony movies.

Maybe there is an expiry date to the deal but from all the evidence I can see, Sony can keep doing their thing without a care in the world. They just know that being connected to the MCU will make them more money, so of course they will collaborate. But they don’t have to.
Profit/production cost split may no longer be desirable in Disney’s favour. They aren’t broke like Marvel was.
 
I'm not surprised by exclusivity. I mean it was the way to go for a long time, and that's how you decide which console to buy. What's the point of having the same things everywhere. I'm even in favor of "in game" exclusivity, like the Avengers/spiderman thing.

If X is paying Y money to have that, fine. It's my responsability as a consumer to reward, or not, moves like that. If one day, some Yakuza contents are exclusive to xbox, then well done MS to secure that deal, and you have my attention. I won't be mad about it.
 
What else explains some of those horrible movies then?
They hoped they would be better? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ They weren't low budget efforts, they had good a cast good and the visual FX were great.

unfortunately this is paywalled. let me find another. A leaked document

I don't recognise Business Insider as a reliable source. They describe themselves as a media company, not a news company and measure their success in 'engagement', i.e. clicks/views. Unlike most credible news who measure success on exclusives and re-reports (other organisations carrying your story). As for unattributed leaks documents? :???:

Does anybody have any other source, @jayco?
 
They hoped they would be better? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ They weren't low budget efforts, they had good a cast good and the visual FX were great.



I don't recognise Business Insider as a reliable source. They describe themselves as a media company, not a news company and measure their success in 'engagement', i.e. clicks/views. Unlike most credible news who measure success on exclusives and re-reports (other organisations carrying your story). As for unattributed leaks documents? :???:

Does anybody have any other source, @jayco?

Doesn't specify exact intervals between movies, but this is an article from 1999 on the LA Times

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-mar-02-fi-13115-story.html
The Marvel-Sony contract requires the studio to begin production of a Spider-Man feature quickly; the actual deadline could not be obtained. It also places Columbia on a short leash in scheduling sequels, requiring in some cases that financing for a sequel be arranged within months of the release of the previous feature.
 
Doesn't specify exact intervals between movies, but this is an article from 1999 on the LA Times

Thank you! This seems bizarre from the point of Marvel presumably wanting to ensure their IP is treated well, with quantity being the metric for failure, rather than quality/commercial success. Sony could do a fair job trashing the appeal of the Spider-Man IP trying to maintain a crazy schedule.
 
MS started it? LOL.

Dude...During the 80s if you wanted to develop a NES/SNES game, you generally had to agree to make that title exclusive to the NES/SNES for at least two years or Nintendo wouldn't allow your game on their system. Instead of paying for exclusivity they strong-armed devs into it using the popularity of their consoles as leverage.

it’s actually much worse than that. While contractually the two year period was real, in reality prior to the antitrust case it was permanent. If you wanted to release on Sega your allocations of cartridge blanks would mysteriously reduce. They directly threatened retailers that displaying Sega prominently, ans even in som ceases carrying them could result in reduction in shipments. These practices are legal in Japan. Most of the “Japanese people hate western things” myth comes from this practice. Japanese culture is very routine based, and you have to give them a good reason to switch to your thing. Japanese companies took advantage of this to run scare campaigns. In Japan people insist on buying things thst can be repaired (weirdos ;) ) and they’d tell them “Oh Samsung could pull out of Japan at any moment and leave you high and dry!” Samsung stopped selling TVs in Japan for years because of this Of course, in reality Samsung made a lot of the parts in the Japanese TVs.

These practices are illegal in the United States, and Nintendo was severely punished by being forced to give $5 coupons to people to buy more Nintendo games. But they were also stopped from enforcing these blanket draconian rules. Thst is not the exclusivity we see today
 
Not all IP holders will be willing to play ball. This year we saw the MLB adopt the position that they would only extend Sony's MLB licence if Sony developed Switch and Xbox versions from next year so that's what is going to happen.

This is an apples and oranges style situation, let me explain

MLB, like all sports games has an extremely limited useful shelf life of about 3 months. Just look at Madden in a few weeks, you’ll see price cuts in under a month. By July, you’ve sold all the full price copies and usually the first round of discounting. All the money is about the consumables after that. MLB gets a massive upfront, as much as 40% of the wholesale price (NFL gets $20/copy upfront and a piece of the consumables according to my friend who worked at EA). MLB wants the game on Switch, as that’s a gigantic thing in baseball countries, and no one buys RBI because it’s awful and they probably want to stop making it even in the barely supported way they have. There’s a lot of kickbacks to be made here, especially from Switch and they want it. Sony is likely OK with it because it’s not going to change their core business.

Spider-Man games are pretty evergreen, especially if they’re good.

The biggest problem for Xbox is this: There are not enough baseball people to support it. The biggest countries for Sony are also the biggest countries for baseball. 2K bailed on this gen because the cost of upgrading and recreating for PS4, where they didn’t sell a lot of copies, and Xbox, where they couldn’t sell enough copies. The royalty plus production expenses took a franchise that was already losing money and rocketed it to the deep.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Microsoft is paying for the port as well. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that they resumed Minecraft updates around the same time it was announced.

Sony and Marvel are a very different story. Marvel has to keep Sony happy so the next round of MCU hostage taking will be the least painful it can be. Sony has exclusivity on Spider-Man, and must approve outside appearances on console, which they’re not doing. Before someone brings up ultimate alliance, they don’t care about Switch and neither does Microsoft. They’re not chasing the same customer. Nintendo consoles are used for Nintendo games, and the vast majority of their owners have a PlayStation, Xbox, or both, and none of those people are buying AAA on fifteen year old hardware. Marvel isn’t going to poke the lion for the 2-3 million copies tops Xbox will sell, as the income from the movies and related merchandise makes that money look like chump change.

The real key to shaking this one up are these protests, which can likely at least force the creation of a window for outside Marvel projects. The biggest thing you can do to help, and I’m not saying it’ll succeed, don’t see any Spider spin-off movie. No Morbius, no Venom (god that sucked), no Silver Sable, nothing. Marvel has poor leverage for renegotiations right now, so do what you can to give them some. No exclusive (I’m sure there are exceptions) sells consoles to people buying them for that game after 6 months, and in reality it’s more like 3, so holding onto exclusivity beyond that is just shooting yourself in the foot. The less reason Sony as a whole has to protect Spider-Man, the more reasonable they will be
 
Given the hardware similarities between the two platforms and Microsoft's growing experience with emulation I think it would be quite funny if Microsoft was able to emulate the PS5 on the Xbox. No more exclusives to worry about!
 
Were people this agitated when Link was exclusive to Nintendo consoles on e.g. Soul Calibur?
Do we even know the extent at which Spider-man can be played on the game? Is it playable throughout the full campaign or a couple of end-game DLC levels that provide just a couple more hours of gameplay?
And how many DLC characters will be added post-release? Is it just Spider-man for Playstation or is spider-man just one among 20 others? There's quite a number of historical Avengers characters they can pick up from.

No. Marvel still owns the rights to the character in video games.

That was the deal back in 2018. We don't know the full extent of the new deal from 2019 that led to Spider-man heading back to the MCU, which was struck after Sony got over 13 million sales from Insomniac's game.
 
I feel this way. Avengers isn't a completed game on any platform aside from PS5. I wont own a PS5 as I rather invest that $500 into a new video card. So i will never own avengers at this point. If they had it timed then perhaps I would have bought it when avengers was complete on a platform I owned.

Now if the avengers game needed more funding to get made or even just funding in general to get made and sony stepped up and made that happen then yea keep the game exclusive for x amount of time or forever.
 
Back
Top