Sony: Microsoft is “kicking the living crap out of publishers”

Rob Dyer, SCE America’s SVP of publisher, slammed Microsoft’s exclusivity policy for its Xbox 360 platform by saying it is only “protecting an inferior technology”.

In an interview with Industry Gamers, Dyer quoted Microsoft’s strict restriction of disallowing games or content if it is not “in parity” with competing platforms, before saying such shackles were only “kicking the living crap out of the publishers”.

“I think what [Xbox Europe boss] Chris Lewis and the other representatives at Microsoft are doing is protecting an inferior technology. I think they want to dumb it down and keep it as pedestrian as possible so that if you want to do anything for Blu-ray or you have extra content above 9 gigs or you want to do anything of that nature, you’d better sure as heck remember that Microsoft can’t handle that,” he said.

“And that’s a huge problem with them. It first started on the smaller pubs, and we can talk about what’s happened on XBL and the policy they have there that requires publishers to have a whole litany of things in order to get onto their network or they have to go through and be published by Xbox, by Microsoft, which essentially lets them dictate how long they’ll be exclusive and whether or not they own the IP, etc, etc,.”

“It’s now progressed to not just be these smaller indie pubs that are obviously very easy to kick around. It’s moved up the food chain. It’s gone to B and A level publishers.”

“So potentially any time we’ve gone out and negotiated exclusive content of things that we’ve announced at things like DPS or E3, publishers are getting the living crap kicked out of them by Microsoft because they are doing something for the consumer that is better on our platform than it might be perceived on theirs.

“So from a creativity standpoint and what we are doing to try to make it better for the consumer, our view is Microsoft’s doing everything they can to eliminate that because they have an inferior technology.”