How Sony’s Cheapness Is Biting The PS3 In The Arse

Sony’s mantra of not writing checks for exclusives–or much of anything–seems to be biting them in the arse a couple times this week. There are at least four cases where the PlayStation 3 has suffered because of Sony’s lack of willingness to open up the purse strings. We knew two of these before–backward compatibility and the DualShock 3–but we only found out about the other two during the roundtable session with Sony’s Jack Tretton yesterday.

The first is exclusives. Final Fantasy 13 coming to the Xbox 360 was a pretty huge blow to the PlayStation brand seeing as they no longer having exclusivity to the main Final Fantasy line. This is just the latest in the line of Sony losing titles that were previously exclusive (or planned to be exclusive) to PlayStation. Grand Theft Auto, Devil May Cry are two more recent ones, but Wired also lists Assassin’s Creed (could have been PS3-only), Virtua Fighter 5, Beautiful Katamari, and Fatal Inertia. What does Sony have of big third-party exclusives? Metal Gear Solid 4.

This, as we learned from Sony’s Jack Tretton, is because they’re “not in the business of writing checks for exclusives.” Jack goes on to explain quite logically that in this day and age, it’s just much more profitable for game publishers to put their titles on as many consoles as possible, and companies would have to throw out some big chunks of money to convince them otherwise. The kind of money Microsoft has been doling out.

The second is Home. Tretton called the current state of Home a “no man’s land,” a phrase which he immediately wished he didn’t use. However, it’s as accurate of one as we could come up with. The problem right now is that Sony’s at an impasse. They’ve finished the shell of Home and much of the core functionality is done. However, there’s no content for it.