Sony Criticizes Microsoft's Publishing Stance, Says It's Protecting Inferior Technology

Sony has outright criticized Microsoft's harsh publishing terms for its Xbox 360, which denies developers that brought their games for the PS3 access to the console, and requires them to ship identical versions for both platforms.

Microsoft defended its publishing stance a few weeks ago, saying that it's in the benefit of actual gamers to have the same game experience on all platforms, even if it means Xbox 360 owners won't get PlayStation 3 games ever, because of the strict terms.

As you can imagine, Sony's isn't thrilled that publishers are forced to bring equal games on all platforms, while not taking advantage of the PlayStation 3's attributes like stereoscopic 3D support or the bigger Blu-ray disc technology.

Sony Computer Entertainment America's senior vice president of publisher relations, Rob Dyer, talked about this issue with Industry Gamers.

"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.

Dyer explained that while this practice first was imposed on smaller, independent developers, Microsoft is now pushing larger publishers to respect these terms or risk being denied access to the Xbox 360.

"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 [expletive] 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."

What do you think? Should developers and publishers take advantage of each platform's capabilities or should they strive to bring an equal experience on all of them?