The 360 and the PS3 are in the middle of a war of bullet points: who has the best high-definition connections, who can do more multimedia stuff, who can cure more diseases... okay Ben Kuchera made that last one up. Or maybe not.
After Sony launched their mega-successful Folding@Home program on the PS3, Microsoft has been hinting that they may offer the same thing. When Jack Tretton of SCEA sat down with GamePro, he made his displeasure at this fact known:
"Would they be even having this conversation if we weren't doing it? I don't know. I would guess that the medical community would take help from anywhere they could get it, but the commentary that I heard is that Stanford isn't sure that [the Xbox 360's processing abilities] would help them very much, which is odd to me because if it helped at all, it seems like they would welcome it with open arms.
It's really ugly territory to get into, but let's take fighting a disease and see if we can get some credit for that. It's not a cool game to play one way or the other, so I don't want to even give the impression that that's our motivation, and I'd be very disappointed if they're looking for PR value or to try to suck off some of the goodwill that we're doing."
Allow he to editorialize a little bit: Jack, shut up. I'm not one of those people who thinks that because celebrities give millions to charity for PR, their money spends any worse. With the hype over the power of the Cell and the help it's given Folding@Home, these comments didn't come only from the giving part of your heart.
If Microsoft wants to do the same thing, let them. The classy move would be to say that you're glad they're following your lead, and you only wish they could do as much as the PlayStation 3 to help move Folding@Home along. Be gracious; this is a big win for you, and questioning someone else's motivations when they want to help out in the fight against cancer makes you look petty.
What a silly thing to get petty about.
