Former PlayStation exec calls exclusivity the ‘Achilles’ heel’ of blockbuster games
“You have to improve your odds by cracking the funnel open”…
Too bad Sony's entire strategy relies on exclusive games to sell their consoles (and not just funding new games, but specifically paying to NOT develop games on other platforms). As long as that happens exclusivity will always exist.
Where are all the articles for the obvious shit I've said? I may not have a lot of money, but I can point out the obvious just fine.
The difference from the past is that game studios are playing chicken with each other regarding development costs and development time, which means games have to sell way more copies to even be close to profitable.
I think Nintendo would be a bigger player than they already are if they werent so hellbent on exclusivity with their consoles.
Think of all those people pirating their latest releases; a significant portion of those pirates are people who just don't want to buy yet another device (especially if they have something better already).
Nintendo is pretty much a hardware company keeping its software wing attached with a very tight leash, and they're losing out on both fronts for it.
Nintendo is also sitting on a huge pile of cash and hasn’t done any massive layoffs, so I don’t think they consider themselves as “losing” by any stretch of the imagination.
I think something a lot of folks don’t realize about Nintendo is that it is VERY shaped by being headquartered specifically in Kyoto. I was talking to a friend about it a couple months ago and she told me about an article she’d read of an interview with the president of Nintendo, and him talking about going to Kyoto business owner meetings and talking to people running business that were nearly 1000 years old, and how in Kyoto, Nintendo was still considered a “new” company because it’s only a little over 100 years old. Nintendo is not gonna chase after next quarter’s earnings, but after becoming an “old” Kyoto company.
Nintendo used to be a hardware company. But once the Wii came out they changed to a software company that shovels out whatever cheap slop hardware they can to rake in low effort money.
Imagine that the Switch could have provided technical advancement like the Nintendo64 did. Bilinear texture filtering was barely supported by top end gaming GPUs at the time, and Nintendo managed to fit it into a home console. Imagine that kind of relative power in todays terms, BotW and TotK could have ran at a stable 120fps right out of the box.
Consoles also fund exclusives more while expecting lower profits with better quality. Playstation is probably the best example of this.
I've been wanting to play horizon forbidden west on PC and it's finally coming out soon after all whole freaking 2 years which is ridiculous. Sony is charging full price too for a 2-year-old game which is also ridiculous. The funny thing is I have a PS4 and I could have bought the game and played it by now but it's the principal. So I'll just wait for it to release on PC and then wait another year or two until the price is about $15 and then I'll buy it.
Patient gamer mindset is the way. Yes you may not be in apart of the current discussion, but I find that discourse around games isn't tempered until several months after release anyways. The older I've gotten, the more patient I've become when it comes to buying "new" games. I'm perpetually "behind" anyways. I've only made two exceptions this year with Helldivers 2 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. Everything else can wait for that sweet deep deep sale price baby.
yeah, exclusives are bad for games and bad for gamers, but they are the only thing that sells consoles.
Id argue that exclusive games are only so good because they NEED to be to sell consoles.
Weird I've been saying this for literally decades
I’ve been a console fangirl since NES/SNES/Genesis (had them simultaneously). I tried pc gaming a few times between 2000 and 2010 or so, and it was ok, but controllers weren’t really there yet, and I’ll be honest, I’m not a fan of wasd control. I preferred console for being plug and play. No question if it’ll run, just pop in the disc and pick up the controller. I also prefer console for the used game market. I’ve bought only a handful of games new, and have over 400 discs. Exclusives haven’t mattered to me because I get all the major consoles when they get cheap (the same game can be much cheaper depending on platform).
But now that consoles are just walled garden computers 5+ years out of spec date on launch with access authorization issues (looking at you, ps+ “you need to upgrade your account” message every time I access a downloaded/streamed game), and most games no longer hit the resale market in any meaningful way if they even launch on disc, what with half the current gen consoles being fully digital and all.. There’s actually less than zero reason to keep on console. And any console maker who doesn’t realize that is going to really suffer for short sightedness. Pc gaming has come a long way since then, with control customization and everything. It blows console out of the water.
They ruined their own markets with their greed, and now they are losing relevance.
I’ve been a console fangirl since NES/SNES/Genesis (had them simultaneously). I tried pc gaming a few times between 2000 and 2010 or so, and it was ok, but controllers weren’t really there yet
I mean, if you like console controllers, there have been adapters since forever. I was using a PS2 controller on the PC in IIRC 2001.
EDIT: That being said, controller support was less-widespread for PC games back then, and because there was no standard controller layout at the time, you'd typically need to set what button performed each operation in each game.
That edit is basically why I didn’t care for it.
I have a pair of usb Logitech controllers and they are alright, but the configuration was a pain, so like.. ehh.
It’s a lot better now, I just have a huge backlog of discs so not in a rush. Probably won’t be bothering with the next generation of consoles though. No point.
I highly doubt they’ll ever do what Microsoft is doing and sell some of their exclusives on the competing consoles, but I hope they’ll start shortening the time between releasing them on PS and on PC. It makes sense financially for them to wait until the prices have started to drop on games to then release them at full price on pc, because they get more money and the new marketing blitz will get some people on PS who didn’t buy it at launch picking it up, but it’s frustrating because it’s such a huge amount of time. Horizon Forbidden West came out in February 2022 but only this month is coming to PC. That’s far too much of a wait.