Sony didn’t miss an opportunity during its press conference at Gamescom on Monday to take a dig at its competitor and the way Microsoft did a U-turn on its Xbox One policies earlier this year, and President of Sony Computer Entertainment Andrew House hasn’t been shy about explaining his reasoning behind the jibe.
"While others have shifted their message and changed their story," said Andrew House during the press conference, "we were consistent in maintaining a message that is fair and in tune with consumer desires."
In an interview with The Guardian, explained exactly what he meant:
"Yeah, I did reference it last night, I did open the door to the question," he says. And it all goes back to that initial Xbox One proposition, unveiled at the Microsoft campus back in May – that the console would be a digital-media machine, that everything was shifting, that game discs were all but obsolete.
The whole thing has been warped and misrepresented since, but the message coming from Redmond was that gamers would have to get used to a new way of purchasing and playing games. We tend to stay away from over analysing what the competition is up to," continues House. "But I’ll characterise it this way: I was surprised … we constructed our E3 presentation because there was somehow a suspicion that the policies and approaches taken by our competition would create an industry trend in that direction. The reason we made such a strong statement at E3, and continue to do so, is because we were surprised by that.
"We thought perhaps slightly naively that the current model worked quite well and was consumer friendly – and our goal was to be consistent on that. But given the speculation that was happening there, it apparently became necessary for us to make a statement and say what our intent was."
While PlayStation 4 launches completely worldwide by the end of November, Microsoft has delayed the launch of the Xbox One in eight countries until 2014, giving Sony an early market lead in the race to shift as many consoles as possible.