” What is this, third grade?” 
 | Sony – ‘We don’t buy exclusivity’ |
| Gavin Mannion - July 4th, 2007 at 1:35 pm - 133 views - One Comment |
Jack Tretton has been talking to PlayStation magazine about the recently hot topic of exclusivity.
It seems that Sony does not quite understand the idea properly. Jack has gone on record saying
We have a very different approach to exclusives than some of our competitors. We don’t buy exclusivity. We don’t fund development. We don’t, for the lack of a better term, bribe somebody to only do a game on our platform.
So Sony does not offer the developer any incentive what so ever to develop games for it’s system. What it does currently offer it a complicated architecture, buggy development tools and a small user base.
Now I wonder why the developers are not falling over themselves to develop for the PS3… I wonder what the heads of Sony are thinking about at this time? They sure as hell aren’t thinking about gamers that’s for sure.
So if Sony haven’t given money over to keep Metal Gear Solid 4 what are the chance of Microsoft being willing to send some of it’s spare cash over?
Link to Sony’s Jack Tretton: ‘We don’t buy exclusivity’ – Joystiq
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July 5, 2007
1:00 pm
This is a funny topic because usually, when a game is sold for say $50, about $10 would go to the developer and $10 to MS/Sony/Nintendo. (I’m just making up numbers, but the point is that the royalties are hared between the platform owner and the developer.
We know the business model, sell the console at a loss and make the money on games and accessories. So the royalties are important to the platform owner.
When the platform owner wants to entice exclusivity, they renegotiate the percentage split between themselves and the developer. Sometime they’ll elect to give the developer the full 100% of royalities. This would probably only be when the console has become profitable.
Now, with this Sony comment, he talks about “bribing and funding development”, but says nothing about the royalty split. It would not surprise me if the MGS and FF developers are getting an unusually large chunk, if not all of the royalty pie on these games.