Community Voice: Exclusivity

Posted by David "Snarkasaur" Stewart on June 1st, 2010

Last week renowned PS3 developer Insomniac announced that they would be making games for the Xbox 360. Not long before that Bungie, notorious for their Xbox exclusivity, announced a deal with Activision that would see them publishing on multiple platforms. The list of exclusive developers seems to get shorter every day. Is this a problem? Will we lose quality if these hotshot studios start going cross-platform? Would Uncharted 2 have been as good on multiple systems? Would Red Dead Redemption be even better had it been exclusive? How does having to program for multiple systems hurt a game’s development cycle? Are the often double sales figures going to make everything multiplatform eventually? What about Nintendo? Can we even argue that their games would be that much better on a more impressive system? What do you think?

What is The Community Voice? The Community Voice is your chance to make yourself heard on Spawn Kill. Yes, you can leave comments on any post that we have, but The Community Voice is a weekly feature that is notorious for encouraging discussion and fostering a sense of, yes, community. We want to hear from readers of the site, and we want to talk to you. So let us know your opinions on the topics each week and let’s get something lively going!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 1st, 2010 at 10:36 am and is filed under Community Voice, Editorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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  • Tigresa
    Honestly, it seems like the consumer losers but in reality it benefits us to continue with exclusivity. If there are no exclusive games than what reason is there to own one particular console? In the end some consoles would fail and imagine it went down to there being only one console? Some might argue that's a good thing but imagine the power and domination they could impale upon consumers if there was only ONE console? Freakin' scary. Activision alone has made PC games $60, a whole console being the leader? They'd have total control.
  • David Stewart
    Yeah, eff those consumer losers!
  • TheHerp
    I think its good that Insomniac is doing this as long as it doesn't take anything away from their exclusive titles. But their partnership with EA is much different because it's through their EA Partners program which leaves EA with much less power.

    To me exclusive titles just allows the game company more time to polish the game and to get more out of the system. When you look at games like Alan Wake, ME2, Killzone 2 and UC2 all of these games are exclusives and they all look and play great. I dont think they would be the same if they were multi-platform, esp UC2. you just cant fit all those cut scenes on a 360 disc, just look at what happened to FF13. I think exclusive titles push the industry forward more so than multi-platform games so its better if we have them.

    At certain point bringing some of the bigger franchises into a multi-platform situation doesn't make sense economically, which is why Bungie and Insomiac is going to put out New IP's. So I’m all for these companies putting out games for all systems as long as it doesn’t interfere with the exclusive titles.
  • Tigresa
    Exactly, what reason would the industry have to push forward as hard as they can if you stripped out the pure competition between consoles? Exclusives help make the industry as technologically future-forward as possible, I think!
  • Allie
    I love exclusivity. It keeps the gaming industry alive (fanboys, gotta love'em) by providing competition among the different gaming systems. Besides a lot of problems can occur with multi-platform gaming because often a game is designed for one system then later on a decision is made to port it to another (a la Bayonetta). Often the port is laggy, has lesser quality graphics, and all around buggy. It's actually really hard for a developer to be exclusive because games are so expensive to make nowadays. I think Gran Theft Auto IV was $100 million....I dunno, Kotaku had a list up a couple months ago. Anyways, the only way a game is exclusive is if Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo is publishing it themselves. Also note that it's more time consuming because developing a game on the 360 is very different from the PS3. Two totally different toolsets, similar to Mac and PC (Bioshock came out nearly a year later on the Mac). So at times, it's easier on the Developer to make an exclusive game, and allows them to spend more time making it the best game they can. Besides, how boring would E3 be (15 days!) if every system had the same games, or if there was only one system?
  • edrigo
    i have issues with several games gone multi plat i find very few actually get it right. Money is i think the poorest excuse to make for a company it stunts creativity alot of the time. Having said that.. if they feel the need to go multi plat i can respect that aslong as they keep at the for-front of there minds that the design of the game comes first over any overriding factors such as money and the dreaded "widest audience possible" egsamples.
  • David Stewart
    I'm actually going to argue for exclusivity, and my reason is one I'm not sure many people think about when this topic is broached.

    Look at games like ModNation Racers and LittleBigPlanet. These are games where community is a central component of the experience. It's also exclusive to the PlayStation 3 community. This means if me and my friends want to play together, we both buy this game and play it on our PS3s. We have no choice, and that's a good thing because otherwise, we might be buying it on all kinds of systems.

    It seems a selfish reason for promoting exclusivity, but I suppose it's an honest one. As someone with every system out there, it really pisses me off when half my friends buy a multiplayer game for one system and half buy it for another. Then I'm split between people and if I even want to play with everyone I have to buy two different copies. That's not even counting hardware like fightsticks and whatnot.

    So personally, I like exclusive games. It keeps a community together.
  • K-Tuck
    I say nothing should be exclusive. Sure, developers working on a specific platform usually get more out of the system than others (like Insomniac), but really, limiting the audience's options never seems like a good idea.
  • CuatroChihuahuas
    Interesting subject for this week! Hmm. You know, there's a part of me that hates exclusives, especially since I really don't have a 360, so I end up missing out on some games (like Allen Wake). On the other hand, exclusives do allow the developers to focus on the strengths of a particular platform, and you don't have the problem of a developer making the game for one platform and then basically just porting it to the others. However, if a game is offered on multiple consoles, then that means more people can buy the game and thus more money that can be made from it. I honestly can't say that I prefer exclusives over multi-platform releases, but I think sometimes you can end up with a better game if it is an exclusive than if it isn't. Of course, that's obviously not always true (cough cough shovelware)...
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