To be totally fair to Microsoft, the variety in genres of the Indie Games they've been pushing out via Game Pass are great. A real mix of family, platform, party games, puzzle games, narrative driven, experimental games. I think you'd have to show pretty strong receipts to claim otherwise. It's been the bigger, AAA exclusives where they've been falling short, but variety in general is not the problem.
That's easy: because Sony is lazy, and would rather just let someone else make the games for them. Why put the money and time and risk into creating an FPS franchise, when someone else already makes a hit FPS franchise and they "have" to release on Playstation?
I think there's some truth to this. I think some people have a real problem with this kind of criticism towards Sony out of loyalty but it is really important to remember the distinction between Sony the company and the identities of their first party studios. Sony clearly have a very strong, great stable of studios working under them, but these are all relationships that have been fostered and built up for over a decade.
I think Sony the company is actually still very risk averse, even though we're seeing great games coming out on the platform. But from a corporate point of view, giving great studios like Sucker Punch, Insomniac and beyond innovate and expand is hardly a risk anymore, because they've proven themselves over and over again. I think Sony's corporate identity really gets lost for some people, because it hides so effectively behind studios with very strong identities and brands.
On that front, I think we've seen Xbox really push ahead, because fans have been suspicious of their corporate identity going back to the Xbox One and flubbing the Kinect launch. They've spent years working to correct that and now the company itself is in a much stronger position. People see them as consumer friendly, genuinely trying to make games more accessible, with more rewarding value. That is the key difference.
This is why I think Jim Ryan's gambit may backfire somewhat. Because it's playing exactly into the image that Microsoft probably wants them to have. If Microsoft come out now and say "No no, we want COD on Playstation. We want all gamers to be able to access it", they look great and Sony look out of touch. I think this will potentially be a key turning point in how people compare the two companies and I'm very interested to see how things escalate over the coming month.
Especially since adding PC cross play and more regular, significant content updates than many other live service games get, it's gotta be one of the most rewarding and unique games in the MS line up.
