The Transporter

No, I didn't post on "it's-a me, Mar10." My March 10th was about as fun as that stupid spring power-up in Super Mario Galaxy, full of surprise expenses and spoiled groceries and no small amount of stress. That mouse hack I found doesn't look like it's going to work with the equipment I purchased, and I'll have to squeak through the rest of the month on a tight budget. My only solace is that I can bitch about gamers bitching about stupid things. Stupidly.

It seems some Playstation fans are crapping their pants to a golden brown about Sony bringing Horizon Zero Dawn to other formats. Perhaps they consider it a personal defeat after crowing for years about how Nintendo was doomed to become a third party licensee. What they're missing is that console manufacturers have been cross-pollinating for years, even decades, dating back to the last century. Microsoft recently brought its Ori and Super Lucky's Tale franchises to the Nintendo Switch, but years before that, they let T*HQ publish a handful of Rare games for the Game Boy Advance, including a couple of titles in the Banjo-Kazooie series. 

Atari had no reservations about spreading
itself around, as evidenced by this
early 80s advertisement.
(image from Twitter)

Years before that, Atari, once considered the unstoppable juggernaut of the video game industry, brought its own library of games to nearly a dozen competing consoles and computers. Thanks to AtariSoft, you didn't have to own an Atari 5200 or an Atari XL to play hits like Moon Patrol, Centipede, and Galaxian... you could do it on a ColecoVision, or an Intellivision, or that Apple IIe allegedly designed to help you learn in school, even though you damn well know you and your friends were really using it as a poor man's arcade cabinet.

The point is, cross-platform publishing has been around for a while. With the PS4, Xbox One, and PC all using similar hardware, it was due for a comeback. It's a smart business strategy to take a game that's been dormant for a couple of years and give it new life on other formats. Nothing is accomplished by chaining it to one console long after the launch hype has faded and sales have dropped off a cliff. Three long years after its debut, nobody's buying the Playstation 4 version of Horizon Zero Dawn. Everyone who owns a PS4 already has it! Judging from its current price, CDKeys can't give it away.

Much has already been said about the folly of taking up arms in a console war. Sony doesn't need your help, really! It's a $45 billion dollar corporation! It's got its own film studio! But even if it did, does it make sense to deny Sony the money that it would make by blowing the dust off one of its older games and selling it on another format? Try not to think of it as an act of weakness... everybody is doing it.