Xbox exec Sarah Bond has revealed how there was a lot of "trust" involved in bringing Sony's MLB The Show series to Xbox for the first time, and the team had to hand over pre-release Xbox Series X|S hardware in the process.
Speaking to Axios and transcribed by VGC, Bond explained that the Xbox team had a massive interest in bringing MLB The Show 21 to Xbox, but in terms of handing over that hardware pre-launch, it required a lot of "industry trust".
“The Show always came up. We always said, ‘We love this game. It would be a huge opportunity to bring it to Xbox.'”
“It was a real, real sign of industry trust.”
MLB The Show 21 also launched as part of Xbox Game Pass on day one, of course, and it was recently revealed that the game had been a massive success on the service, bringing "millions of new fans" to Game Pass.
It's still crazy to us that MLB The Show 21 not only exists on Xbox, but is also included with Xbox Game Pass. We were waiting a very long time for a proper, realistic baseball sim on the platform, and it's great to finally have one!
What are your thoughts about this and MLB The Show 21 in general? Let us know down below.
[source axios.com, via videogameschronicle.com]
Comments 9
Ummmm.......... sooooooo yeah..... how about that.
This didn't even occur to me. In order to bring MLB over to Xbox, Microsoft had to literally give the Series X/S to their primary competitor before both of the companies' systems launched. Granted, I doubt that Sony would've done significant changes to PS5 during this brief period that they had access to Microsoft's systems. But still, that's actually quite insane.
Lol is that why Sony revamped the PS5 on the fly and was holding out on the price point?
Deals like these are not rare, in other industries. They usually are tied to huge contracts and tons of lawyer work, so not just thrust. I’m sure the contracts prevented the MLB team from revealing any information about the hardware to any other Sony team.
A famous similar collaboration is Apple and Samsung. For years Samsung has manufactured Apple chips, but are not allowed to bring that manufacturing learning into their own manufacturing. There actually been a few lawsuits between the two companies over instances where Apple believes there been breaches of the contract, and none of those stopped the collaboration.
Corporations are weird, they can be at each other’s throats with one arm while hugging each other with the other arm.
Yeah, they're not allowed to get caught when they share the information they learned.
It's like in court rooms where testimony is considered invalid and the jury of instructed to forget what they heard. Right. Never even heard that confession. Innocent I say!
Wow,I never even thought of that. Sony had a freaking X and S on their table the whole time.
And they still built an 80s tape deck as a chassis.....
Shows how desperate they were to get the MLB game….. big baseball fans at MS
There has to be so much lowkey industrial espionage and leaking between the two (and AMD, and other developers with dev kits) for each gen of the consoles to always be so broadly similar in specs. I'm sure this made little difference other than confirming what they already knew.
EDIT: the last one I heard REALLY surprised the other was when PS4 suddenly doubled the RAM to 8GB at the eleventh hour and made it GDDR5 in PS4, none of the dev kits had this. This was a surprise to almost everyone and has been pretty widely documented since then.
I think it also proves that a lot of the toxicity/console war is at the superfan level. The systems are very similar anyway and they ultimately don't care as long as we continue throw our wallets at them.
I think we need to bear in mind this happened the other way too so MS could support Minecraft on PS5 ?
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