They would have to have been crazy not to
In a move that should shock absolutely no one, it appears that Sony actually did rewrite bits and pieces of its E3 2013 presentation after witnessing Microsoft’s own announcements crash and burn.
Sony Computer Entertainment boss Andrew House confessed today at a Develop 2014 conference that he himself had actually rewritten pieces of the script after being faced with concerns that PlayStation would mimic Microsoft’s policies in the future.
House explained himself further: “It made us feel a little bit clearer about our message, when a lot of the negativity was emerging around DRM issues and used games. I remember reading an article literally the weekend before E3 that was basically saying that this is the direction Microsoft was taking and that it was only a matter of time before Sony adopts the same approach.” Literally.
“That sort of put me on the back foot and I went and re-wrote portions of my E3 presentation script that weekend and we re-crafted the presentation because there was now an onus on us not to be seen to be going down the same path.”
While House is adamant that Sony didn’t change its actual position at any time, it quickly became apparent that some changes for clarity were indeed called for at the time in order to reinforce Sony’s decisions on used games and DRM.
“All it did was make us come out and state very clearly ‘the status quo has been good to us, consumers like the choice and the balance that achieves’. It wasn’t a shift in strategy, it was just a feeling of a necessity to go out and communicate something that we just took advantage of.”
Microsoft’s PR blunders caused Sony to re-write E3 PlayStation 4 script [Eurogamer]