CriticKitten said:
UltimatheChosen said:
Mr. Omega said:
I'm curious: Why is it Nintendo is the only one who "needs" to stop having exclusive first-party titles? This line of thinking never comes up with Sony or Microsoft. It's always Nintendo.
They're not the only ones that should do it. They're just one of the most prominent examples.
Okay. Then go ask Microsoft about Halo, or Sony about Uncharted. Tell them you don't think they should keep those games locked onto their consoles because folks might "miss out".
Halo 1 was released on the PC. And it's worth noting that Nintendo (arguably) has more exclusive IPs of consistently high quality than any other company. Even the less respected Mario games like Super Mario Sunshine are still
really good games.
Nintendo isn't the only one to do this, but they
are the poster boy for it.
CriticKitten said:
You don't get to whine at Nintendo for doing the same thing as every other console on the market.
Sure I do, because the stuff that every console is doing is stupid, too. These companies are making games, intentionally limiting their audience, and then losing money hand-over-fist because sales need to be astronomically high to recoup development budgets.
CriticKitten said:
What's with this mentality that "consoles shouldn't ever have exclusives", anyways? Why exactly should a business not be allowed to offer products which are only available through them? Oftentimes the most attractive prospect of any product is what it does differently from every other product of similar intent on the market. That's a fundamental aspect of competition in the business world. If your product is just like every other product of similar intent, you don't stand out and you're less likely to attract a large following.
What people are basically proposing when they say "no console should have exclusives" is a world where consoles are all samey and bland, because they'd all play the exact same games (and presumably so would PCs in this "utopia" of non-exclusive gaming, thus eliminating nearly every benefit of owning a console in the first place) and would offer nothing unique to differentiate themselves. I'd rather have three distinct consoles with their own rosters of games than three shitty PCs.
It basically sounds like this core argument is fueled by people who don't have the money to own all three consoles but don't want to actually have to make a decision for themselves about which console they want most. Tough. You can't always get everything you want with everything you buy, sometimes you need to compromise and make sacrifices. You want to play Nintendo games, buy a Nintendo console.
Yes, that's
exactly what's fueling it. That, and people who don't want to buy any console, but still want to play the games on a PC.
"Three distinct consoles" simply will not happen, because there won't be enough third-party support. We're already seeing the industry buckle under its own weight-- as I noted above, budgets are so large that games need to see tons of copies just to break even. No publisher is going to put that kind of money into a game that's tailor-made for a console that not everyone has.
This is the reason why the Wii failed for hardcore gamers last generation-- even though there was a lot of interesting stuff you could do with motion controls, anything that used those motion controls in a meaningful way was incompatible with PCs and the other two consoles. It wasn't worth the money to make Wii games, and thus the bulk of the big releases were Nintendo games. The Wii did get some third-party support, sure, but it paled in comparison to PCs and the other consoles in that same period.
Console wars, and the exclusives that go along with them, are
stupid. I'm a fan of Nintendo's games, and I'd buy them, but I'm not going to drop hundreds of dollars on a console so that I can play the six or seven games that interest me over the next five to ten years. And that goes for every console.
