I’m not much of a console game player. I have a Playstation 2, but that’s just because I got a good opportunity to upgrade when my original Playstation was stolen and we got the insurance money. To be honest it’s mainly used as a rather noisy DVD player. I buy the occasional game, but only when I see them in sales as I think that the RRP is far too expensive.
I was, however, interested to see that there was going o be a game based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and I looked forward to buying it. Recently I saw it was in the shops, but only for the Xbox. I couldn’t find any information about its availability on any other platform so I emailed Fox Games to find out what their plans were. This is what I wrote:
I’m very interested in buying your Buffy the Vampire Slayer game, but I see that currently it’s only available for the Xbox.
Can you please let me know when the game will be available for the Playstation 2 as I’m not that big a Buffy fan that I’ll pay for a new games console in order to play the game :)
I know that Xbox sales have been disappointing for Microsoft and they probably need all the exclusive deals they can muster right now, but surely your first responsibility is to your customers – most of who won’t have an Xbox.
Frankly it seems a very strange business decision.
Today I got a reply:
When Buffy the Vampire Slayer was envisioned as a video game, all parties involved agreed that we should not compromise the vision of that game for any reason. When it came time to shift Buffy into the current generation of consoles we decided that the Xbox was the only system available that would allow us to make the game as we wanted to make it. While every system available would have given Buffy its own look and feel we felt that the Xbox’s powerful architecture allowed us to create a graphics engine that would display the locations from the show that we all know and love true to life and still allow us to pack the game full of exciting and addicting gameplay. There are no plans to port Buffy to any other system at this time. Thanks for writing and happy gaming!
So it looks like I won’t get to play the Buffy game after all[1]. It’s nice that they claim it’s some kind of artistic integrity thing, but I’m pretty sure I don’t believe them.
[1] And no, I can’t go and play it at someone else’s house. I don’t play video games in front of other people – I suck far too much :)