Sony rewrote their E3 2013 PS4 script after seeing Microsoft’s backlash

Sony Computer Entertainment boss Andrew House specifically rewrote PlayStation 4’s E3 2013 pitch in order to distance the system from Microsoft’s policies and the public uproar they generated after seeing concerns that Sony would follow suit.

“It made us a feel a little bit clearer about our message,” House said during today’s Develop 2014 conference, “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.

“That sort of put me on the back foot and I went and rewrote 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."

House remains adamant that Sony did not change their policies in response to Microsoft’s, but that they simply chose to make their existing stance a more prominent feature of their presentation.

“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,’” he added. “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.”

Similarly, House stated that Sony always had the core gamer market in mind when developing and promoting PS4, in stark contrast to Microsoft’s multimedia efforts with Xbox One. 

[Eurogamer