Console Exclusive Games - The Grass Is Always Greener On The Other Console

Posted by: Chris Madore on September 8, 2010 at 3:51PM
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We've all been there; watching a new game trailer and then having your reality shattered by seeing that it's only available on a competing console. Console exclusives are certainly nothing new; I missed out on a lot because of my childhood choice to own a Sega Genesis instead of a Super Nintendo, and later a Nintendo 64 instead of a Playstation. Though older and wiser, I still can't justify buying ALL of the current consoles, despite their alluring exclusive titles. How much longer will they be around though?

You won't see Heavy Rain on the Xbox360 or Fable III on the Wii, and the reason is fairly transparent; the respective console producers would like to hold all the aces and lead you to believe that they have enough to warrant your purchase of their system. First party titles, like the Legend of Zelda series, are the cards played closest to the chest; few would expect Halo or Mario games to release on any other console than their mother company's. It's the second and third party developers that produce more and exciting new game franchises that cause much unrest in the barracks of the console wars.

Exclusives haven't always stayed true to their titles; porting to other consoles later in their life or later offering their unique downloadable/unlockable content for other systems. The Soul Calibur series provides an interesting example. When Soul Calibur II shipped for the GameCube, Xbox and Playstation 2 each had a unique extra character intrinsic to that console. In the opening weeks, the GameCube version, with its inclusion of Nintendo's Link character, led the sales. Despite this, when Soul Calibur III launched it was only for the Playstation 2. Soul Calibur IV revealed a unique Star Wars character for the XBOX360 and PS3 versions, but months later revealed the ability to download the missing character on the other version.
Sales Figures Source: IGN



With a few degrees of variance, console makers actually profit very little from a standalone console. They recognize that they are expensive investments to consumers so prices are driven so low that a company may find themselves in the red for the first few years until the console becomes cheaper to produce. The consoles act as a seed that they have managed to plant. A consumer is unlikely to buy a console and then never buy anything for it; more than likely they have chosen a few games for it and perhaps additional accessories, the likes of which are the end reward for the company. The consoles are priced such that they represent a significant enough barrier to simply buying all of the current generation of consoles. A console company needs to strike quickly and fiercely.

...Or atleast that's the theory. Does it hold any water? In May the Nielsen Company had conducted a report on consumers purchasing a new console near the release of a console exclusive, asking what determining factors most strongly persuaded their new purchase. Despite buying the console near the launch of said exclusive and professing to be very excited for it, the game itself was listed as a very low determining factor in the console purchase.
Source: Nielsen

Are console exclusives coming to an end? EA Founder Trip Hawkins believes that with the advent of downloadable games and high networkability, console exclusives may become a thing of the past. “In the future, any kind of game company will have to have a technology approach that gives them agility across platform boundaries. That's going to play into where gaming needs to go, which is to become like SAS - or Software as A Service - where customers are going to the Cloud, where they have an account and where they have virtual items and they can play.”
Source: Game Theory

It certainly seems to be the trend even with some of the more legendary console exclusives. Final Fantasy XIII launched on both the PS3 and the Xbox360, and the upcoming Metal Gear Solid: Rising game will be released on both consoles as well. Even highly regarded exclusives like Mass Effect 2 are being ported away from their home console after a successful launch. And why not? The game producers make more money off a game that has already sold well on another platform and has generated its own hype. Gamers aren't forced to borrow a friend's console or shell out for a different one. Console exclusives act as the pride of the more hardcore console fans and the security blankets of the console producers, but only act as deterrants to game producers and gamers. An odd outlier to this trend would be Nintendo's Wii, which seems proof that a console can thrive almost entirely off an exclusive first party lineup.

Console exclusives are a matter of economics, politics, and pride, but ultimately it hurts gamers who just want to play whatever they see that interests them. Will there be less consoles in the future? Perhaps PC gaming will be the accepted focal platform? In any case we can all hope to see less barriers between us and the games that interest us in the future.