One of the biggest announcements to come from GamesCom 2014 was the lack of announcement for Rise of the Tomb Raider on PS4. Specifically the fact that the game would arrive exclusively on Xbox One. With the Tomb Raider reboot having arrived on both consoles previously, the fact that Square-Enix would sign an exclusive deal with Microsoft and the Xbox One which are behind in sales made little sense to gamers. Especially after Square-Enix had previously revealed that the original Tomb Raider reboot needed to sell 6 million units to become profitable. Cutting your audience base in (more than) half made little sense which meant that Microsoft had to be cutting quite a large check to Square.

Thankfully for gamers, we’ve since learned that Rise of the Tomb Raider will be a timed exclusive on Xbox One though the specifics of the length have yet to be revealed. So why didn’t Sony try to negotiate their own exclusivity for the game and for that matter, why is it that games only trend to go exclusive on Xbox? After the jump, PlayStation Europe President Jim Ryan (pictured above) explains.

Here is what PlayStation Europe President Jim Ryan had to say about exclusivity on the PS4:

 Well, you know, we’ve got a very large and very powerful network of studios on our own, all of whom are working on games that will be fully exclusive to PlayStation, and we feel that this on top of partnering with third parties where it makes sense. I think the partnership we have with Activision on Destiny is a good example of where it makes really good sense for them, it makes good sense for us and it benefits our consumers – when you complement those two things we think that gives us a pretty complete position in the market.

So do we feel the need to go out and buy outright exclusivity? Probably not. You saw last night [at Sony’s press conference] that before the media briefing we showed updated videos of games that we had revealed at E3. That’s because we wanted to keep the show itself full of new, fresh things. We think that gave us a good, strong, convincing portfolio of exclusive stuff and we’re happy with that. 

Reading between the lines reveals that frankly, Sony doesn’t need to spend the type of money that Microsoft does to stay competitive. There is little doubt that the only reason Microsoft was a contender previously was due to the enormous money they’ve thrown at Xbox. This includes extensive marketing and lots of exclusive titles, be it for the lifetime of the game or timed exclusivity like Call of Duty DLC and other such deals. With an extensive amount of games coming from Sony’s own first party studios, Sony doesn’t seem to need to spend money to keep games away from Xbox fans where instead, they can keep that money and invest it into their own platforms.

Sony has especially called out 2014 and beyond as a year of investment into PSN. With the PlayStation Now beta opening to the public and robust and network intensive features like Share Play arriving in the fall, it’s no wonder that Sony would rather invest that money interlay. It’s also worth pointing out that due to Sony’s financial standing, the company doesn’t quite frankly have the money that Microsoft has to throw around. This ironically might be the reason the PS4 has been doing so well, due to more limited resources which meant Sony had to focus on what they wanted to bring to the market. This is in direct contrast to the Xbox One, which has tried to be an all-in-on entertainment machine which hasn’t sat well with gamers – and the sales results show. So how do you combat that? By buying game exclusivity in hopes of driving people to your console.

Discuss:

Should Sony pursue game exclusivity?

[Via CVG]