House: Microsoft policy ‘warped and misrepresented’

Sony’s PlayStation 4 bossman Andrew House says that Microsoft’s initial Xbox One policies were ‘warped and misrepresented’ after their initial reveal.

House made headlines at Gamescom for taking a swipe at Microsoft for backing off those policies, but now the executive has taken a more conciliatory tone in an interview with the Guardian.

"Yeah, I did reference it last night, I did open the door to the question," he said when asked about the incident.

“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 PlayStation 4 was by comparison a conservative machine designed to take advantage of the core gaming demographic while still reaching out to new technologies like streaming and cloud computing.

House says that Microsoft was definitely sending a message to gamers, but that this message was considerably warped afterwards.

“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,” said House.

As far as Sony’s antics after the initial Xbox One reveal are concerned, it largely came down to what the PS4 boss claims was his company’s surprise at the road their competitor was taking.

“We tend to stay away from over analyzing what the competition is up to, 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,” said House.

“The reason we made such a strong statement at E3, and continue to do so, is because we were surprised by that.”

House’s words became a bit more sarcastic as he described the approach taken by the PlayStation 4 team, and suggested that after Microsoft’s initial Xbox One revelations it needed to be pointed out why Sony would stick with physical media.

"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,” he said.

“But given the speculation that was happening there, it apparently became necessary for us to make a statement and say what our intent was."