Sony: New R&D team for Microsoft?
No, not really. But we all know that over the last year or two, we have seen previous Xbox 360 exclusives coming over to the Playstation 3 with improvements. The xbox 360 was then labelled among the core gaming crowd as a machine for beta testing future Playstation 3 titles. That may be partly true, but look closely at what Microsoft has been doing to Sony. Sony have been doing some pretty bold and risky projects this generation in attempt to bring them back to the top, they’ve been great ideas, but not all of them executed very well.
Take home for example, had a great concept behind it, but the final execution wasn’t great to appeal to the masses. Don’t get me wrong, they have done pretty well with some of the stuff they offer there, and have a nice community. But Microsoft, everyone mocked them with the Avatars, but what they did there was kind of look at why people were hyped up for Home and took the simplest method and experimented, people, specifically the mainstream audience like to have something they can customise and represent them online, we see this on social networking sites, forums, everything with user profiles, that was the first step. The second step was looking at how people customised their Avatars, Home again, people proved they are willing to buy clothes and items for their virtual avatar, so Microsoft streamlined and copied that idea, once again, it worked.
Third step is what we come on to now, Microsoft Game Room. One of the potentially coolest ideas behind home was getting together and playing some games in the same space while chatting to each other, things like fun arcade games. We got around three arcade games to take to our apartment and have one person play through the entire home universe over all regions. Microsoft saw this potential and created Game room, it is essentially a mini home space to play and challenge your friends on arcade games. They claim there will be thousands of games available to buy over the next three years. One of the best features? They’re nearly 100% cross-platform with Windows PC, buy them on Xbox, play them on your PC, earn all achievements on either, and they will carry over.
The Playstation 3 is doing extremely well at the moment with great sales, publicity and most of all, games. But with every risky chance Sony has taken, Microsoft have learned from their mistake and some how used it to improve their system with. All that R&D Sony did, for the only company to really get it being Microsoft on a rival console. Yes, it is not as simple as this, and there are many ways that have turned in Sony’s favour, but i just thought it was interesting how clean and efficient Microsoft have been at effectively stealing and improving on Sony’s ideas.
