A few weeks ago, when a portion of Capcom's contract with Sony for Resident Evil Village circulated on social media thanks to ongoing digging into the Capcom data leak, a lot of folks got rather upset. To many who don't stare at legal documents for a living, a portion of these papers seemed to suggest Sony paid Capcom to make the game effectively worse on other consoles, holding back features so that the PS5 version would look good. Another tweet suggested that Sony paid to have the PC version of Monster Hunter World delayed.
It didn't take long for lawyers and other games industry experts to step in and reassure everyone that this was utter nonsense.
These accusations revolved around something called "parity clauses," a standard inclusion in many games industry contracts between platform holders like Sony, Xbox, Nintendo, and some of the PC game stores. Parity clauses are so boring that of the three legal experts and two publishers I asked for comment for this article, multiple were baffled I was asking at all, with one of them telling me that asking them about parity clauses was the equivalent of asking them if I had copper or PVC pipes under their sink, or asking them about the weather.
But while they are a standard part of the day-to-day for many games industry folks, understanding parity clauses does provide an interesting bit of insight into one of the ways publishers and platform holders try to protect their own businesses and ensure everyone playing their games has a good time regardless of platform.
What are parity clauses?
Broadly, parity clauses exist to ensure that the things you buy are roughly the same no matter where you buy them. Parity clauses exist in a lot of other industries beyond gaming, with Gamma Law managing partner David Hoppe offering the hotel industry as an example: a "rate parity" clause might require a hotel to match the lowest room rate they provide to other online travel agencies.
In the games space, Whitethorn Digital CEO Dr. Matthew White offers a retro example:
"In the 90s, games could appear dramatically different on two different systems and be sold for the same price with the same SKU," he said. "...I mean, you had dramatic graphic and audio differences between systems. Sometimes it'd be whole features missing and things. And so I think that's what console manufacturers today can easily look back on. No parity means that if a developer encounters some kind of framerate hitch on PlayStation for whatever reason, instead of going and seeking out help from the platform to resolve that, or working with their technical support, they just release it that way."
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Parity clauses can cover a lot of different aspects of a game. As technology and gaming attorney and counsel to Stein IP, LLC Marc Whipple put it: "First and foremost it’s going to be about player experience parity. Significant features, unless they’re just not available on a particular platform for technical reasons, have to be comparable across all platforms. Content has to match up (no leaving out significant quests or stories or characters or whatever.) DLC, support/backend if the developer is providing those, etc come after that. And of course if the versions are meant to release at the same time, that will be provided for as well. But mostly it’s about consistent experience."
Games industry attorney Angelo Alcid also mentioned price parity clauses, suggesting that platform holders might ask that games be sold at the same price on every storefront. But he added that price parity clauses are currently receiving scrutiny from the EU and now US governments and "are considered by some to be anti-competitive," meaning they may be going out of style.
Who signs parity clauses?
Parity clauses are traditionally signed between platform holders and publishers. So the three console makers, plus PC storefront owners like Valve and Epic Games, all have parity clauses included in contracts with publishers who want to put games on their stores. They're in basically every contract in some form, though the specifics will differ.
An anonymous publisher I spoke to who was familiar with parity clauses told me the publishers with several games will frequently sign a blanket agreement with a platform holder that covers all their games over a certain period of time and applies to all of them. Meanwhile, Whipple mentioned that very small independent developers might be less likely to sign them, especially where the developer is fulfilling the same role as the publisher, or where only one game is in question rather than a portfolio of multiple titles.
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And Whipple had another group of people to add to those in gaming interested in parity clauses: license holders.
"If I license a property like Star Wars or Marvel Heroes or whatever, that licensor is going to have [sic] signoff on every licensed game," he said. "And they’re either going to have explicit parity clauses or they’re going to insist at signoff that if Platform A version is awesome but Platform B version sucks, either Platform B version doesn’t launch, *neither* version launches until they’re both approved, or they can just pull the license altogether."
It's also worth pointing out that parity clauses often interact with exclusivity deals in relevant ways. Alcid suggested that parity clauses can occasionally inadvertently create exclusivity "in a roundabout way."
"If a dev/publisher really wants to release on a particular platform, but maybe doesn't have the resources to develop several versions in parallel, they may end up only developing for the platform that is pushing for release parity," he said. "Conversely, such a dev/publisher may find that parity clause off-putting enough to decide to go exclusive on another platform altogether, or may have already released the game in some form elsewhere and think it isn't worth the trouble trying to open a dialogue around an otherwise-disqualifying parity clause. In this latter case, the parity clause ends up inadvertently causing exclusivity for someone else."
But while exclusivity deals are a separate thing, platform holders who want the business of certain publishers may be willing to bend their parity rules to get their hands on a really juicy game for their storefronts.
Who enforces this stuff?
One thing everyone I spoke to was clear about was that while parity clauses are important, they aren't exactly well-enforced. Alcid recalls Microsoft being criticized around the early days of its ID@Xbox program for enforcing release date parity for its independent partners, but notes that it's since softened its stance.
Some of the lack of enforcement is intentional, and most is for the better. One obvious reason why parity might not be enforced is that it's impossible. As an example, White suggested that a Nintendo Switch is never going to be able to match the performance capabilities of an Xbox Series X, and a mobile phone isn't going to match either. Furthermore, a game released on all three systems will inevitably have slightly different control schemes on each, as well as possible shifts in UI or other small tweaks to account for the inherent differences between platforms. This is normal, and those I spoke to said that the industry is largely fine with these differences.
In other ways, that lack of enforcement is less driven by necessity, and more chalked up to an "everyone is doing it" attitude. Alcid told me that feature parity is pretty important to everyone involved -- cross-saves, language options, and so forth -- but "content" can be a bit murkier.
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"The 'content' piece in particular can come into play with DLC and other add-ons as well, preventing a game from releasing platform-specific content for someone else," he said. "Like Spider-Man only being in the PS4 version of Avengers -- if Microsoft were still particularly concerned with their parity clause, they might have taken issue with that." For the record, Alcid was not referencing any specific knowledge of Microsoft's contract with Square Enix for Avengers; this was just a hypothetical example.
The anonymous publisher I spoke to noted that this is why we sometimes see timed exclusives, or different exclusive content on different systems.