It's actually less than a month until the arrival of Crimson Desert, Pearl Abyss' incredibly hyped and sought-after role-playing game that somehow manages to sound more and more desirable every time we hear about it. Just last week, it was revealed that the game will not feature microtransactions or similar elements because "this is made to be a premium experience that you buy and enjoy the world, and not something for microtransactions."
But it's not just us gamers who think this looks really, really good. Sony was also seemingly impressed by what the Korean developers had to offer, and now Forbes reports that they therefore tried to buy exclusivity for it to prevent gamers on other formats from playing it:
"...the studio said it was approached by Sony with the pitch that Sony would pay to make PlayStation its publisher and, in turn, lock up an exclusive deal that would launch on PlayStation and avoid Xbox for an entire year. "
Fortunately, Pearl Abyss said no, which means more people will have the chance to enjoy the adventure starting May 19. The reason they weren't interested is explained as follows:
"Such a deal would mean a large chunk of revenue, in addition to platform fees, would go to Sony as the publisher, something Pearl Abyss wanted to avoid."
Sony used to regularly release its own large-scale single-player adventures. In recent years, however, there has been a clear shift towards more live services among their own studios, while they have instead begun to focus on purchasing third-party single-player exclusives such as Black Myth: Wukong and Stellar Blade. What do you think of this strategy?