 No, I don't actually hate Sony in PlayStation 5. Do I need to lick it? Do I need to lick the DualShock, DualSense, whatever controller to prove it to you? Fine. All right, so yeah, it's another day. It's another Sony PlayStation video. And it's another one where we have to talk about a negative thing to do with the company. Again, I really enjoy my PlayStation 5. I have my criticisms on its hardware design and other things. However, I really enjoy playing games on it. And I think this DualSense controller, while not built to last, definitely, while it does last, is maybe one of the most revolutionary controllers I've ever used. So I'm not here to sit here and say that Sony is some horrible company. All of the companies, whether it's Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, they're all for-profit businesses. Every decision they make is about maximizing revenue. But there's been one thing that's been happening over the last, gosh, handful of years, I'd say, that has been more of a pro-consumer move across the industry, rather than necessarily being about maximizing profits, at least for platform holders. And that is, of course, cross-play. I mean, we all remember, I'm sure, the Better Together update for Minecraft between Microsoft and Nintendo. And the big controversy about how Sony wouldn't let cross-play exist on their platform. And now we actually had an email come out from 2018. I don't want to really dive too deep into it because Epic Games doesn't necessarily look great either, nor does Sony. They both kind of look like greedy bastards. But in that email chain that leaked out now, it looks like Sony was basically saying, hey, look, we're not letting anyone do cross-play unless you can tell us how it benefits us, how we profit off it. Which, again, kind of mimics the attitude Sony's had about cross-play this whole time. Yes, there is cross-play on PlayStation platforms, notably between PlayStation and PC. But cross-play with Xbox, cross-play with Switch. There is a sparing title here and there, but there is far more cross-play between Nintendo Switch, Xbox and PC. And then obviously Xbox and PC. There's a lot of cross-play between pretty much everybody else, and then Sony sits on an island and then occasionally allows cross-play with PC. And this is typically because the way Sony views it, especially under Jim Ryan, is everything that happens with cross-play needs to benefit PlayStation. It can't be about the gamer. It can't be about adding a beneficial factor that makes games on your platform more valuable. It has to be how does adding cross-play to your title benefit us by allowing others to play with Xbox friends instead of making their Xbox friends by a PlayStation 5? It's an understandable marketing point but it's also, dude, you're basically saying gamers don't matter. Which to be fair, I think all of us have always known at the end of the day these companies just care about the money. So Sony doesn't think cross-play matters. It can't benefit them. And that comes from a cross-platform revenue share policy. This is an official print-off of a policy from PlayStation that's been handed out to developers over the last four years. And this is about, oh, hey look, we'll let you do cross-platform now. However, the only way you're gonna do cross-platform is with a revenue share. Let's talk about this. So it says, if the proportion of the PlayStation Network revenue share divided by PlayStation 4, because it's obviously what's from the PlayStation 4 slide, share for a title is less than 0.85 in any given month. So basically if the amount of revenue share is less than 0.85, the partner will pay Sony Interactive Entertainment a royalty to offset the reduction in revenue. A royalty. Okay, the partner has no obligation to pay Sony Interactive Entertainment a royalty in months where PlayStation Network revenue share divided by PlayStation 4 gameplay share is greater than 0.85. So basically you're going to punish developers for the gamers playing their game on your platform also possibly playing it on other platforms. So let's say you're playing Fortnite on your PlayStation 4 or your PlayStation 5 and you decide I'm on the go, I'm not bringing my PlayStation 4 with, but I have my Switch, I'm gonna do cross-play with my Switch in Fortnite. Yeah, we're gonna punish you because your consumer is choosing to play the game not just on our system, but on other systems. We're gonna punish the developer for that. What? All right, both PlayStation Network revenue share and PlayStation 4 game share are determined by the information provided by our partner in the data requirements. Here's a calculation example. Cross-platform revenue share equals cross-platform revenue across all cohorts times PlayStation 4 game share minus PlayStation Network revenue times 15%. Pretty complicated equation to just figure out, oh man, how much money are we making off our gamers and are they spending more time and more money on other platforms playing this game? So month one, $1 million in cross-platform revenue, PlayStation Network revenue is 900 million. So PlayStation Network revenue share is at 90%. PlayStation 4 game share is at 95% cross-platform revenue share is at $0. So basically, if a gamer is playing something like Fortnite and all these gamers are playing Fortnite and there's a million dollars in cross-platform revenue but 90% of that revenue took place on PlayStation Network, hey, we're not gonna charge you anything. Congrats, your cross-platform is fine. But if you had that same million dollars in cross-platform revenue, but only $600,000 in this example, so 60% of that revenue was spent on PlayStation, yeah, you owe us $52,500. Why? Why do they owe you money because the gamers are spending the month? This discourages people including, if you have a big audience on any other platform, PC, Switch, Xbox, and you wanna include cross-platform playing your PlayStation version, you're gonna get punished for it because you're already making such good money on the other platforms. They're punishing you for including, they're saying if you wanna put cross-platform on our platform and you know revenue share on that thing is big on other platforms, you better not do it on our platform because we're gonna charge you for it. What? Here's how the payments work. The partners shall provide each Sony Interactive Entertainment Territory, so SIEA, SIEE, and SIEJ, and SIE Asia, with monthly reports of any such PlayStation for revenue share and shall pay the apical SIE territory invoice within 30 days of the date of the invoice. Payments commence on the month the title exceeds or is expected to exceed 500,000 in PlayStation Network gross revenue and within a 12-month period. SIEE have the right to audit partners' books and records related to cross-platform revenue in accordance with section 151.3 of the GDPA. In other words, Sony is essentially telling you we're gonna monitor all your books to make sure you're not lying to us and hey, you don't make enough money in our network because you make 50% of your revenue on other platforms, fuck you, you're paying us money if you put cross-platform on our platform. Sony is literally turning cross-platform integration into a for-profit business, and I get it. Sony is a for-profit company, but as far as we're aware, and I've talked to some developers on this that have worked on some games that have cross-platform play, these policies do not exist at Nintendo, they do not exist at Microsoft, and obviously there's no such policy that can even be apical to PC. I mean, Steam, I guess, could try to hold your balls over the fire and try to make you pay, but that's not gonna happen, there's just other ways you can get games on PC, so good ol' games, Epic Games Store, et cetera, you don't have to use Steam. Steam sometimes gets a little full of itself and there's options on PC. So here's the thing, I think what's happening here is that Sony just thinks so highly of themselves and they're so scared that enabling cross-platform play will discourage people from playing the game on their platform at all times, discourage people from buying PlayStations for some ungodly reason. Remember, Sony, I know like Switch, you can argue right now is the current market leader since PlayStation 4 is old news, but technically, Sony, you've been the market leader pretty much consistently since your inception of the very first PlayStation, right? You had that one generation with PlayStation 3 where we was actually the market leader, but you've been the market leader every single time before cross-platform was even a thing. Why would adding cross-platform play devalue your system? Why would you punish game developers for wanting to implement cross-platform play to bring all the gamers of their product together? Like, that's the thing. What's cool about third-party, multi-platform games is when they're multiplayer, it makes so much sense to the end consumer to just let you play with anybody on any platform. Sure, you can still have platform-exclusive servers like if you're on PC and you just wanna play against PC people and something like, I don't know, Call of Duty, Modern Warfare, Warzone, Call of Duty, Warzone, right? You wanna play just against PC players? Fine, you can. You wanna play just against PlayStation players? Fine, you can, Xbox, you can. But is it hurt to allow also people to play cross-platform? You wanna play with your buddy who owns a PC but you happen to be on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5? What the hell's the problem with that? Oh, they don't know Xbox. What the hell's the problem with that? All right, all right. It doesn't make you enough money. It's a very complex issue, but when you have the rest of the industry basically saying, hey, why would we put restrictions on cross-platform play? Why would we even tell you you can't do cross-platform play without it benefiting us? And why would we tell you that if you, now that we allow cross-platform play, that you have to pay us if people spend X amount of your cross-play revenue, which is basically anybody playing the game if you make more money on a different platform. You make 40% of your revenue on another platform. You pay us. What? Because that's considered lost revenue? What if, here's what's frustrating. What if gamers are spending more playing these games because they can now play with any friend they want on any platform they want because of cross-platform play? So, well, the percentage of revenue might be lower. Like say, only 60% of all cross-platform spend is happening on PlayStation, but you're making a higher percentage of money, like a higher amount of money. Let's say, but without cross-platform integration, you're making, oh, I don't know, $500,000 a month off Fortnite or whatever. After cross-platform integration happens, well, it turns out that, hey, there's actually a lot more spend happening in cross-platform play, but you're only getting 60% of that spend, which is $600,000. She's actually making $100,000 more than before cross-platform play, but because that's only 60% of the overall spending cross-platform, you epic pass money. I mean, I'm just using Fortnite as a common example because that's one game that heavily supports cross-platform play. There's a lot of other games, Call of Duty and others that have been dabbling in this cross-platform nonsense. This is why you see things like Madden is not cross-platform play. We could crap on EA all we want, but the reason it doesn't have cross-platform play is because if Sony is gonna be a bitch about it, why the hell would EA care to deal with that? Why would anybody, you know, any developer care to work with this kind of program, this kind of platform on cross-platform play, oh, they're gonna bring their game there because there's a huge audience, but man, Sony. Jim Ryan, I mean, does this all just go back to Jim Ryan? Jim Ryan already isn't looking that great. I don't, he's not in the hot seat. PlayStation's in a great place, it's making a lot of money. I mean, it's cool, some great decisions were made like with this DualSense controller, although again, longevity issues, but a longevity issue with PlayStation 5 in general. But still, for a while it works, while PlayStation 5 is running and while this controller's working, it's brilliant. I gotta say, I mean, guys, I'm a Nintendo guy. Hello, Joy-Con Drift. We have our issues, right? Ben Gate at the beginning. Nintendo's not perfect, all right? They make plenty of issues. Some people have issues with the $60 for Skyward Sword HD, 3D All-Stars, being a limited thing. I get it, okay? Nintendo, Empire, I criticize them all the damn time. But the reason this stuff like this comes up because it frustrates me, because this is the kind of thing that doesn't just affect Sony, okay? This affects other developers. This also affects me as a Switch player. Now, granted, I own all platforms, but still it affects me because if I have friends that play on other platforms and I have a preferred platform or a preferred controller, if I prefer to play on Xbox Series X or PC or Switch or PlayStation 5, why can't I play with my friends around other platforms? Because Sony is disallowing it. They're actively making my experience as a gamer worse on other platforms because they're being bitches and want all the money. They're being so anti-gamer. Remember, remember the old brandy for PlayStation for the gamer. No, no, no, it's for your pocketbooks. You don't give two shits about the gamer or you wouldn't have a policy like this that's actively punishing developers if they decide to include cross-platform play. You're hurting gamers and hurting game developers. How dare you, Sony? I mean, what do you care? Your profit margins are all time high. You're selling the most, you know, fastest selling system of all time right now, 7.8 million. The never had a system in the history of video games sell this quickly. PlayStation 5, you can't find anywhere. It's sold out, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Sony doesn't care. They're laughing their way to the bank. But issues like this need to be called out and need to be brought up for the betterment of the industry because as we have seen, pressure on companies like Sony can make a difference. Example, they were gonna take away our access to buying brand new PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita games and they went back on it because of Backlash. So stuff like this matters. Bringing this up matters. All right, folks. I'm Nathan and RoboJance, I'm Nathan and Brian. Thank you so much for tuning in. Now, you know, unironically, I'm actually gonna go play some more Miles Morales on my PlayStation 5 and I wanna finish beating that game. I already beat Sackboy, Astros Playroom, beating this. I think next up I'm gonna be, not Returnal, because Returnal's got too long between gameplay says, but I'm gonna be playing some, my next game I'll play should be that Demon's Souls or Dark Souls Remake, whichever it is. I already have it purchased and downloaded. I just gotta play it. I haven't turned on my Xbox Series X in a little bit. I do have MLV of the show on there. I'm gonna go check that out in a little bit. And for Switch, I'm playing New Pokemon Snap. I'm actually playing a lot of games right now. This is crazy. Whatever. Also, by the way, hey, we have a huge E3 thing going on. I don't know if you guys have heard thousands of dollars with the stuff from consoles and accessories and games where we've partnered with a whole bunch of companies. We're gonna have the biggest E3 extravaganzas ever. You're gonna play one-on-one against Erik and I for prizes. You're gonna see Erik and I play against each other during E3, whether it's the Smash Bros or Mario Kart or whatever we decide to play and have punishments and all this jazz. Lots of entertainment, highly professional built set. You're gonna see me wearing an outfit that you've never, ever seen Nintendo Prime wear before. It's just great. We have so much backing, so much money invested. This is gonna be an E3 show unlike any other. We're hoping that you guys decide to come and enjoy E3 with us as we react to everything, talk about everything, and put on our own show, a show within a show. This is gonna be E3 done Nintendo Prime style. All right, folks, I'll catch you guys in the next video.