Do platform-exclusive games really matter?

Looking back at the last generation of consoles (PlayStation 2, Xbox Original, GameCube), there were undoubtedly some people who would buy a particular console just to be able to play a particular game, or game series. Just look at the popularity of the likes of Mario, Final Fantasy, Gran Turismo, Halo, Grand Theft Auto, or Metal Gear Solid. These are all very familiar franchises when you’re talking to gamers. And each one of them is associated with a particular last-gen console. But as we become more accustomed to referring to XBox 360, PlayStation 3 and the Wii as the current generation of consoles, are we past the days when a platform exclusive title would guarantee the ongoing success of a platform? Well yes and no…

Only an absolute fool would argue against the fact that Sony won the last generation with the complete dominance of the PlayStation 2. Hand-in-hand with that was the fact that most platform-exclusives were only available on Sony’s console. Move forward to the current day and the picture is very, very different. With the headstart that Microsoft had on the current generation, the majority of exclusives are now available on the XBox 360 (and a lot of them with releases under the Games for Windows banner show Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to gaming). And franchises that were once the domain of PlayStation owners only, are now either on multiple platforms or, in the case of Beautiful Katamari for example, have completely switched and are now only on the XBox 360. But what has lead to this switch, and what is the effect for gamers like you and I?

Gaming is a big-bucks industry
The cost of games production is now far higher than ever before, and whilst not quite at the level of movie production costs, producing a triple-A title is now a multi-million pound project. Because of this, development studios and publishers want to maximise their return in terms of potential audience numbers, and the easiest way to do this is to launch on multiple platforms. This is something that is indicative of how “new” the current generation of consoles still is. In the last generation, the dominance of PlayStation 2, and the fact that the console now has an installed base of well over 120 million units, meant that launching a platform exclusive for the PS2 wasn’t really an issue or a risk. Even if only 10% of the owners bought the game, you were still selling 12 million copies, which is a massive hit in terms of games sales. However, with the current generation there are nowhere near the number of consoles in the market, and certainly no single console that is dominating the figures quite so heavily, and so multi-platform is the only viable way forward for the vast majority of games (there are some exceptions which we’ll come to soon).

Can an exclusive sell a platform?
Now this is a tricky one. If you consider game genres, then there is no single console that has a genre exclusive to it. You always get driving games on all the consoles. The same with shooters, puzzle games, sports simulations and platformers. Sure there will always be a different slant on the genres for each platform. The 360 has Halo 3 whilst the PS3 has WarHawk. The Project Gotham franchise will always be exclusive to Microsoft, while Gran Turismo will be the same for Sony. And while there are subtle differences between the games, they all boil down to the same thing within their genre. So do people really go out of their way to buy a platform just for a specific game? I guess there are some people who always will (and be labelled as fanboys for doing just that), but for the vast majority, they will pick the best game in the genre for the console that they own, and they’ll get hours of fun out of that game.

Even if we introduce the good old PC, this argument is still true. With the runaway success in the MMORPG genre that is World of Warcraft, one can’t deny that this has led many people to upgrade their PCs, but how many people have gone out and bought their very first PC just to play WoW? I’d wager that the figure isn’t that high.

Cross-platform gaming
With the expansion of XBox Live to include PC-gaming, there is now the possibility of sharing online games irrespective of whether you play on a 360 or a PC. Shadowrun is a good example of this. Players can use either the PC or 360 to play the game, and when they connect to a game lobby they may be the only player in there on that platform, but they won’t know any different. This does involve extra work in terms of balancing each platform version so that one doesn’t have an advantage over the other based on the platform, but the thought of being able to have the same experience across different platforms is an exciting one. Unfortunately take-up on this has been slow to date, with no major titles following in Shadowrun’s footsteps, but the ground-work is there and the emphasis now is back with the developers and publishers to utilise this, but Microsoft are the only manufacturer to be able to offer this due to the dominance of Windows on PC, and you can expect take-up on this cross-platform gaming to ramp up over the next 18 months.

Fanboyism
Unfortunately when you start to talk about platform exclusives, you’ll always awaken the fanboy in us all. I personally prefer Project Gotham to Gran Turismo, and am happy to tell anyone this. My opinion has come from playing games in both franchises and selecting the one that feels best to me. That’s all it is, an opinion. But there are some people that will take it beyond this. A little while ago Capcom announced that the now-released Devil May Cry 4 would be available for both the PS3 and 360. And what a hornets nest that kicked up. Previous titles in the franchise had been PlayStation exclusive, and Capcom suddenly found themselves on the bitter end of the fanboy’s abuse. Being accused of “betraying” the community that had stuck with them through the franchise, there were even calls for people to boycott the franchise unless it was released only on Sony’s platform. Fortunately Capcom stuck to their guns and released for both platforms, and unsurprisingly for such a well known franchise, sales were healthy.

A shift in focus
So with the current generation of platforms, it seems there is little to choose between them in terms of games. So how do the new breed of consoles manage to differentiate themselves? It seems that each of the manufacturer’s have decided that this generations platform-exclusive should be something other than the games. For Sony, it’s the inclusion of a Blu-Ray player. With Nintendo it’s the new way of actually playing the games with the motion sensing technology. And for Microsoft it’s the inclusion of the pervasive online presence, achievements and the video marketplace. But does this really move people towards a particular platform? Blu-Ray won the High Definition format war thanks, in no small part, to the number of PS3s that hit the market. The Wii is considered to be a “party games” console and is regarded as being most fun when there are a lot of people in one room. Microsoft will tell you that being able to chat to friends no matter what game they are playing, and having a persistent online presence, is the way forward. And for these three reasons, each of the manufacturers attracts a slightly different audience.

So what next?
So where does this leave the platform-exclusive title? Well it’s far from dead and buried. I doubt Microsoft would swap the Halo franchise for anything that either Sony or Nintendo have in their stable for the current generation. But we’re now seeing 2 new breeds of exclusivity emerging. There is the timed-exclusive. With this, a title will appear exclusively on a particular platform for a limited period of time, before it appears on any other platforms. Against this there is the platform-exclusive downloadable content. Microsoft have ensured that the only place that you can play the “full” Grand Theft Auto 4 experience is on the 360. With multiple chapters of downloadable content coming exclusively to the 360 in 2008 and 2009, Microsoft are using the launch of GTA4, once a Sony exclusive of course, to increase it’s lead over the PS3. They have had to pay the price for that exclusivity ($60 million according to most sources), but as I said at the start, the budgets for producing games are into the multi-millions now.

So what about you? Has a particular title taken you to a particular platform? Do you look for the best version of a particular game, or just the best one in the genre on the platform that you own? And what platform exclusive title do you think could win this round of the console war?