 As my first real article here on Neo, I was fixated on a few subjects, but something caught my eye today: Rus McLaughlin's column “Tough Love for Playstation” over at IGN. I could go into detail about how I think the article is so filled with inconsistencies and views that went out of style in the middle of last year, and how Rus needs to apologize to the gamers for focusing on Sony without bringing up others that do the same thing he accuses Sony of doing, but someone already did that (thank you, HHG). Instead, I'm going to go do a column that I think fits right now, in 2009: do the same thing Rus did, only towards another company. That would be Microsoft.
Of course, we cannot deny that the 360 has had success during its time on the market, and it obviously has a lot of games to play. However, there's a problem I have with that. Where do the games come from, and at what expense and reason do we have to pay to be able to play these games on the 360? Microsoft, when you got the GTA4 DLC for 50 million dollars, what was the whole intention? To steer people away from getting a Sony console for the game since the game became so popular on the PS2 (note that I didn't say the game originated on the Playstation. It just got where it is now on the Sony consoles. There's a difference)? That may have worked in the short run, but look at what it got you. You soon got greedy. “If we can get that, we can get anything with some cash”. Here came Eidos with the extra Tomb Raider Underworld level and the Fallout 3 BS that took place last year. Here came the games that were PS3 exclusives going multiplatform, such as Final Fantasy 13 and Tekken 6. Of course, a lot of the games that you were getting were third party games. Yeah, your fanboys were happy that you “stuck it to the evil Sony brand”, but at what expense? You know that those same third parties can turn on you in an instant, and can just as easily give you a huge middle finger.
Take a look at Bioshock, for example. For months after the 360 release of that game, 2K Games kept denying that there would be a PS3 version, despite continued reinforcing of the rumor. Then, last year, around summer time, it happened. The PS3 version was announced. But that wasn't the only thing that happened, did it? Lida Tang went on record on his blog (he took this post down, for some reason, but search for “The Lies We Tell: Bioshock's Exclusivity" on Google and you're bound to run into someone who posted the entire text he said on a forum somewhere) that you paid for the exclusivity. Now that they have an established franchise and PS3 coding experience on their hands, though, they really don't need your money, and they seem to have things well in hand with this multiplatform thing. And how about that Rockstar deal? You don't really expect for Rockstar to keep those DLC episodes exclusive forever, do you? Not saying that you can actually squeeze money out of something that you only make soft claims about sales wise. With no hard data to back up your one million download claim of Lost and Damned and no word yet on whatever Gay Tony is doing, it's hard to imagine that you would be pleased with what 50 mil got you.
And what could've you done with 50 mil? How about starting up some first party studios? See, this is what your solely lacking right now, and that's why 2009, while you still had Halo Wars and ODST, has been nothing to write home about for the console. You can't hide that, for many 360 gamers (note I didn't say 360 fanboys, to which they'll play ANYTHING you throw at them), the power has been OFF for the system. Hell, I bought mine earlier this year, and despite me playing some Mass Effect and Fable 2, the former's exclusivity is still a hot button topic to many gamers, I haven't been playing the system that much. Seriously, did you really think that the Halo offerings would be enough? I have a PS3, too, with more established friendships and a pretty good trophy count. If there is a multiplatform game, it's going to be played on the PS3 because I got more people to play the game WITH online and a more established account on PSN. So I'm looking for some good exclusives that you can bring to the table. Gears? Halo? Is that all? What about the stuff you never give publicity to? You gave Halo all kinds of commercials, plasters on consumable products, and the like, but I didn't see any Mountain Dew bottles sporting Crackdown or Fable? The only reason Star Ocean: The Last Hope got publicity was, you guessed it, the hot button issue about the exclusivity when you KNOW JRPG's sell better on the PS3, at least in Japan, where you keep trying to win over despite those crazy Japanese continuing to give you the finger.
Where are the first party games, Microsoft? How can you seriously say that you have the bigger game library when you kill most of your first party studios, you only advertise the Halos, and you pay for everything else? Those who adopted the PS3 first are just going to be angry at you and call you out for trying to monopolize the gaming market, and 360 gamers will be angry that they got no true exclusives besides Halo to play because you keep depending too much of preying on big developers' greed. I want to play something that I know I can only get on your system that you actually wowed the developers and the gamers with. I don't want to play something half-assed just because you want to make your system into the Playstation “2.5” and are more concerned about beating your competition over the head with “me too” ware like NXE and Natal rather than actually trying to cater to us gamers.
And what about NXE? Besides 1 vs. 100, which became a huge waste of time from all the delays and the fizzled launch (though I am sure some people were happy to see it and do play it), my avatar is doing absolutely NOTHING! He sits there. No expressions. Just some hops every now and then. What else is there for him to do? Wait, the party thing, sort of like the game launching that Home has. So that's the “me too” ware, as well, right? What else is there? Nothing! Not a damn thing, yet I'm told to believe from both you and your fanboys who don't know any better than to blindly praise everything you do, that you came up with this yourself, and that it's the best thing since sliced bread. Please? People bitch about nothing to do in Home despite Sony continuing to add so many new things that those bitching need a sanity hearing, yet that has more to do than you ever gave those Mii-like avatars. Oh, was I not supposed to bring up the Nintendo Miis in comparison to your avatars that you put into an interface that is a hell of a lot like the XMB (and you didn't even do THAT right) when the blades worked good? “Me too” ware for the win, I guess.
In fact, the only real way I can actually do ANYTHING with that damn avatar is by paying for services I should never have to be. Seriously, besides cross game chat, a longer time on the market, and the fact that so many fanboys just praise the service without any second thought, what else do you offer for me on Xbox Live that the PSN does not that makes it worth the 50 dollars a year? Granted, it's not much, but I have to pay for things that the other service can give me for free, and the rumored 3.1 firmware is supposed to be offering more things that those that praise your service has been wanting Sony to add. So where does that leave you? I don't think anywhere, actually. So where do you justify the payment I have to give you in addition to everything else I have to buy into on Xbox Live. Every theme is premium (yes, fanboys, I know Sony offers those, too, but at least they offer free themes, too), and they don't even look that well done. Really, the only good thing you have going for it is the XBL Community games, and even those aren't free. And seriously, are those people that are making the games getting any compensation from you for all that hard work? Not really. Not even a free trial of XBL Gold. As Silver is a complete JOKE, you MUST have Gold to be able to do anything on the service. Only thing you can do is to compare Achievement scores, and I don't do that because I've yet to make a friend on XBL because I've been playing my other systems more. In fact, one of the N4G admins that is on my PSN friends list refused to accept my XBL friend request because she only uses it to do reviews for her personal site. Get that, Microsoft? That admin is even playing the PS3 and Wii more than your system right now, so much so that she refuses the XBL friend invites (to those N4Gers, you know which admin I speak of. She's the only female admin I know of ON N4G).
Hell, when Metroid: Other M comes out, I'm firing up my Wii once more and playing to holy HELL out of that (just remember to actually give Samus a voice this time, Nintendo. Enough with the silent protagonists you keep having boners for. I would love to hear that your main characters were taught how to TALK when they were toddlers, but I digress). You have nothing else besides ODST and Wars. Oh, hold on, you have Left 4 Dead 2 (which has a lot of hot button topics coming from that alone), and Splinter Cell: Conviction. But L4D2 is from a company that has its own rabid fanboys and that other devs are too chicken shit to call out when Gabe says something stupid about the PS3 (more on that in a future blog), and the other was too chicken shit to take on Modern Warfare 2 and ran for 2010.
And about those Achievements: IMPROVE them. When I actually downloaded Pac Man (so sue me) from XBL Arcade and went to get Achievements, whenever I unlocked them, I get a system message saying “3 for” whatever amount of Gs I got. Well, WHICH ones? I was lucky that the game showed icons of my actual Achievements. The PS3 trophies ping each one individually, and I love hearing that sound that I hear when I get those (I can hardly hear yours). Oh, and the tiers that the Trophies have plus that platinum trophy on disc-based games make it that much worthwhile since I can easily see which trophies are worth obtaining (and for us trophy whores, ALL are worth it). With your system, I get...an arbitrary number that you probably just pulled out of a damn HAT (sort of like Edge's and Eurogamer's review scores). I have no way of knowing what Achievements are easy to get and which are hard, and no way to show (besides the full green bar) that I got all the Achievements, and nothing more to show for getting all of them. Yeah, it is obviously working, but it's now a sorely outdated system that you have refused to tweak. You instead give us Facebook, Twitter, and a Games on Demand service. The first two I can do on my PC without any problems (and again, you have to have Gold to do those because God forbid you give anything away), and the Games on Demand service is right now so flawed and overpriced that many just don't use it. Why you stopped doing the Xbox Classic thing is beyond me. Maybe it's because of you only allowing us to have a certain amount of space on our hard drives, and the HDs you provide are so overpriced that we just learn to deal with our 40 gigs or whatever it is we got when we bought your system.
About that, too. I have touched on so many of the software issues, I haven't even gotten to the mark of the beast on your system yet, Microsoft. It's the fact that your systems hardware reliability rating is fucked up eight ways from Sunday. How many times has it been now that you thought you had that dreaded Red Ring of Death bug figured out, only to have it come back a few months later? Oh, don't worry. Your sheep will just buy their sixth 360 when the other one stops working out of the three year warranty you gave people (seriously. Three years? If you need THAT long of a warranty, then the red flag should show up with that alone), all while praising the BBC for highlighting the barely negligible failure rate of the PS3 as some sort of thing that should never happen. So wait, that slight failure rate isn't acceptable, but a 54 percent failure rate IS? Please tell me the logic in accepting the much, MUCH larger failure rate for a system that you just rushed out there because you hold a grudge on Sony for kicking your asses last gen as normal. I don't get it. Sure, there are some that have bought the system back in 05 that have yet to experience it, but finding those people is like finding a needle in a fucking haystack. You should have a lot of people having as much luck as those people (assuming they are honest in their claims), yet you have horror story after horror story.
It's no wonder you keep dropping the price of your system every time Sony drops the price and has some momentum, like they do this year, with their PS3. You don't want the same thing happening to you that happened to you last gen. You got very lucky (and I mean EXTREMELY lucky) that Sony fucked up the launch on their system with that 600 dollar price point, because you sure as hell fucked up yours with the failure rate. Then came all the controversy about how moral you were about gaining all the third party support while closing up a lot of your first party studios. Hell, that's how you got to the off year. Yeah, I'm sure you will do something to get back in the game, such as a mail in rebate that...oh, wait, you already did that. Maybe you can lock Hiroshi Wada and Dan Houser to give you Final Fantasy 14 and Agent to you, too, not that MMOs exactly work on your console and you screwed over Rockstar more than enough times because you would never shut up about the GTA4 DLC and giving release date promises that Rockstar never gave for the material. Hell, you took advantage of Wada's greed enough times, and you probably have him in your conference room now. If only you would fix the XBL's pricing strategy...and if Dan would just stop kicking and screaming at the door frame so you can shut the door.
But I don't hold my breath waiting for you to actually showcase the 360's hardware capabilities to third parties to get exclusive content, or to fix the hardware issues to where the failure rate is into single digits, or for you to finally just give gamers some love. Why? Because you have those damn fanboys. The same people that say that PS3 fanboys are the worst of the bunch. You have the media praising everything you do and worshiping the ground you walk on every time you make an announcement. They will never question your hardware reliability, or your decision to use a handcuffing physical media format as the main format for the 360, or that you have no first party studios (oh, never mind, I forgot about Turn 10. I hate having to bring up the fact that Mr. Greenwald needs to shut the fuck up about Forza 3 being able to part the water and make it rain money). They just go back to your system, buy their seventh 360, insult the PS3 gamers like no one's business. There's no need to change your strategy when you have loyalty like that, huh? You can't possibly see the harm of retaining your status quo, do you? No need to change if the people who need to question you never do. They will never call you out, never ask you why it's okay to have this attitude. But behold, they question your competition without any second thought on anything they can manufacture, will they? No need to actually change anything if you can get away with your half-assed way of doing business. No need to actually show anything real with Natal if the media and your rabid fanboys are ready to gobble it up at first sight.
Let's be honest here, Microsoft. Your strategy has backfired on you, and the backlash on that IGN editor about his anti-PS3 article just shows you how many people really think that your competition has the edge over you right now. You have to change something, and do it fast, because your 360 may just go the way of the original Xbox. Fix the hardware issues (and I mean REALLY fix them this time), stop with this “me too” ware, and focus more on your own system instead of making your system the Playstation 2.5. That's how you got to this drought in 2009, and that may be how 2010 will start and end for you if you don't get it together soon. No more price cuts will help you this time. Give us something other than exclusive third party DLC and multiplatform games, other than Halo, to tell us that we should still care about your system.
See what I did there, Rus?
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couldnt agree more, I couldnt believe watching the watch dog show of ps3 failure rate I was like what? Its like they've never heard of the RROD