Sony Takes Another Dig At Microsoft Policies

I think most of us are familiar with this video, where Sony pokes fun at Microsoft’s original and confusing plans about how to share games on the Xbox One versus the act of simply lending a game to your friend on the PS4 before Microsoft reversed most of their initial Xbox One policies.

Microsoft’s attitude towards indie games has been a point of contention as well. To their credit, many indie game developers have praised their “ID@Xbox” program, which is designed to nurture and build an indie library on Xbox One. There is, however, criticism from some about Microsoft’s policy of “launch parity,” which essentially boils down to that indie developers must launch a game on Xbox One the same day they do other platforms. And Gamespot noticed that Sony apparently couldn’t resist taking a shot at this policy:

Now as noted in the article, a Microsoft representative recently told Edge magazine that they will “work with indie developers on a case-by-case basis” in regards to launch plans. However that statement doesn’t really say that they will reconsider that policy.

The question is why do they need to do that at all? Under this policy, virtually nothing released on the PS4 so far (and it has already had a fairly solid number of indie titles released on it) will never see a release on Xbox One. Granted, indie games aren’t AAA games, but consider the dearth of AAA next-gen titles. Yeah there’s Titanfall for Xbox One gamers and Infamous is just around the corner for PS4 owners, but what about after that? We wait two months for Watch Dogs with nothing to play in-between (and that’s assuming Watch Dogs isn’t a disaster, which I’m not sure it won’t be).

Indie games help fill that void quite nicely. Simply put, to date there is a decent amount of indie games on PS4 and very few on Xbox One. This policy really makes no sense and only serves to punish gamers who are craving content on their new console.