Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida has described the Microsoft Gamescom Tomb Raider announcement as “a cryptic message by Phil Spencer.”
“It’s very interesting the way Phil Spencer said, what we are saying is, in holiday 2015 Tomb Raider is exclusive to Xbox. So it’s open to interpretation,” he added.
Yoshida was, like the rest of us, surprised by the announcement, and cheekily hinted that Microsoft would have had to pay a lot of money for the deal.
“If you’re a marketing person at Square Enix and projecting your sales for the game, if it doesn’t come out on PS4, it must be lots of units that have to be covered by some means,” he said.
Source: Eurogamer
JR.
This Yoshida guy is hilarious. So I guess if we are to take his word for it then this wasn’t a deal that was open to everyone and MS did approach SE with their cheque book. Sad times.
Starman
Find it hard to believe the exclusivity wouldn’t have been offered to Sony first with the larger ps4 sales. I guess its better than saying “we couldn’t afford it”.
Sony are coming across as quite bitchy lately, this and saying EA access wasn’t good value. Its like they’re the ones behind in sales.
rossthebassist
for £39.99 or the equivalent of £3.33 a month you get 2 vita, 2 PS3 and 2 PS4 games every month that’s 72 games a year across a variety of publishers. Some are great some are meh… but the value is there. From the Sony camp all Access is, is PlayStation plus but for EA only games. and how many EA games come out a year… its not 72. so EA’s subscription from that point of view is not great value. on the other side, if you play multiple EA games it is great value.
I think Sony should have just embraced EA and what they wanted to try, whats the worst that could have happened. People buy a PS4 because of it?
Starman
Problem I had with plus was the games I wanted to play I’d already played when they were released. I also had a problem with half the content not loading on the Ps store and after 5 months of it not being fixed I didn’t bother wasting my money renewing. As usual the “support” was clueless.
JR.
That would imply that Square Enix were the ones seeking a partnership though which doesn’t appear to be the case given the bits and pieces of info we have. After all, the game was originally intended to launch on all platforms. Phil Spencer even said they wanted Tomb Raider because they didn’t have anything like Uncharted on the Xbox. Add to that the cryptic and intentionally misleading way in which the exclusivity was announced and it all seems pretty clear. My guess is, MS approached SE with a deal they couldn’t refuse and SE jumped on it. MS then chose to keep the deal hush-hush so they could ‘steal the show’ at Gamescon with a surprise announcement and get one-up on Sony. There were probably all kinds of confidentiality clauses in the contract with SE preventing them from speaking out. Look at Square Enix recent, pathetic statement about the exclusivity agreement… ‘Phil Spencer has confirmed…’ not ‘we can confirm’ …they can’t even tell their own fans that the game is only ‘timed’ exclusive. Can’t risk loosing those 20 pieces of Silver they got from MS. As for Sony knowing about the deal first… maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. But why risk harming their credibility with a false statement when they could just keep quiet about it?
bunimomike
I’m not sure your perspective on this is remotely accurate. I’m almost 100% positive that Microsoft approached SE which means Sony had absolutely nothing to do with this and SE must’ve come up with a figure that was pretty damned high then be equally stunned when Microsoft said “yes”.
Sony’s reaction is one of a total lack of information (from inside the industry) as this has obviously been forged recently and they’re finding out about it too.
double-o-dave
I see your point there but I think they meant EA wasn’t good value in the reasoning that other companies could follow suit too ending up in gamers forking out 3 or 4 quid 5 or 6 times a month if the games they want are spread between different publishers/developers. It could potentially end up costing people £30 a month in subscriptions.
Personally, I’d just rather pay £40/50 for the games I want there and then.
Matthijs
All this time I’ve been wondering what the guy’s at Square Enix will do if the game is received as mediocre and sales are horrible on PC and (hopefully)PS4 after the deal ends. People tend to buy it anyway right after it’s released but 6 months later a mediocre game just wont sell very many copies.
Starman
Its very unlikely the game will be mediocre. Sales wise they have already protected themselves against lower sales by doing this deal.
Youles
Amusing dig at MS.
I understand Square Enix’s decision to sell exclusivity if the reboot sold less than expected, as it will give them some security and the exclusivity money will effectively be pure profit since they game will release the game on other consoles later on. However it must have cost MS a bomb since PS4 has sold 10,000,000 units, which is more than XBONE, and after the Titanfall devs/publisher said they wished they hadn’t gone MS exclusive since it limited their sales. (I think that last bit is true).
Kennykazey
Well, I suppose Sony could have approached Squeenix if they had the money. I don’t blame MS for offering the deal, but rather SE for taking it. But I suppose it must be a helluva lot of “means of coverage”.
Yoshida-san is brilliant, one of the most likeable people in the industry if you ask me.
Moonpie
We just need to be patient and wait to see what the terms of the exclusivity deal is. I saw a vid which said exclusively on Xbox holiday 2015 which gives me hope that the deal may not be as long as the original Sony deal was. Plus I can see MS making the assumption that if they keep the deal length stum people will buy an xboxone over the ps4