It has personally never really bothered me that much. Yeah, there are moments where I wish I could play a game or two on another platform, but never so much so that it has made me hate exclusives all together.
I suppose there are two ways to look at this, the gamers approach and the business approach, from a gamers point of view, it can be restrictive as well as annoying if you only own a selected console, but at the same time I feel that once you go with a particular platform, you already know the sort of games you will want to get. If I wanted to play games like Star Fox, Super Smash Bros and Zelda, Nintendo would be my console of choice, for games like Uncharted, Resistance and Heavy Rain, PS3 is my console of choice, for Halo, Gears and Forza, Xbox is my console of choice and for high end graphics and mods etc, PC is my gaming platform of choice, so there is something for everyone. I would probably find it boring if all the consoles had the same games, I'd probably end up buy consoles for the wrong reasons, less about games (the key feature) and more about Facebook integration, DVD playback and other things which would be a shame as comparing the consoles purely on the fact that one might have facebook and the other doesn't sounds a bit lame. We buy our selected consoles for the games and the way in which our preferred console handles those individual games, either graphically, multiplayer etc, but regardless, its about the games.
From a business standpoint, it may seem like a developer will get less money by going exclusive, but that isn't always the case, in fact, sometimes going exclusive makes more profit for the developer then going multiplat depending on the developer. Obviously a decision to make GTA5 for example an exclusive would be a stupid idea, but for a small developer it may be beneficial if the console developer offers all the right incentives, a payment, cost cutting, developmental help AND advertising that they would not get or would have to do all themselves if they went multiplat. Take Heavenly Sword for example which performed better as an exclusive then Enslaved did as a multiplat. Exclusivity has not broken Halo for example, yeah it probably would have sold more in an ideal world where it wasn't an exclusive ip to Microsoft, but then it would have cost more to make and would also be crippled due to the fact it has to perform the same on all consoles.
So I ask you this escapists, is exclusivity all that bad? In what cases do you think it is a stupid decision and what benefits do you think all games and dlc (in an ideal world) being multiplat would have?
I suppose there are two ways to look at this, the gamers approach and the business approach, from a gamers point of view, it can be restrictive as well as annoying if you only own a selected console, but at the same time I feel that once you go with a particular platform, you already know the sort of games you will want to get. If I wanted to play games like Star Fox, Super Smash Bros and Zelda, Nintendo would be my console of choice, for games like Uncharted, Resistance and Heavy Rain, PS3 is my console of choice, for Halo, Gears and Forza, Xbox is my console of choice and for high end graphics and mods etc, PC is my gaming platform of choice, so there is something for everyone. I would probably find it boring if all the consoles had the same games, I'd probably end up buy consoles for the wrong reasons, less about games (the key feature) and more about Facebook integration, DVD playback and other things which would be a shame as comparing the consoles purely on the fact that one might have facebook and the other doesn't sounds a bit lame. We buy our selected consoles for the games and the way in which our preferred console handles those individual games, either graphically, multiplayer etc, but regardless, its about the games.
From a business standpoint, it may seem like a developer will get less money by going exclusive, but that isn't always the case, in fact, sometimes going exclusive makes more profit for the developer then going multiplat depending on the developer. Obviously a decision to make GTA5 for example an exclusive would be a stupid idea, but for a small developer it may be beneficial if the console developer offers all the right incentives, a payment, cost cutting, developmental help AND advertising that they would not get or would have to do all themselves if they went multiplat. Take Heavenly Sword for example which performed better as an exclusive then Enslaved did as a multiplat. Exclusivity has not broken Halo for example, yeah it probably would have sold more in an ideal world where it wasn't an exclusive ip to Microsoft, but then it would have cost more to make and would also be crippled due to the fact it has to perform the same on all consoles.
So I ask you this escapists, is exclusivity all that bad? In what cases do you think it is a stupid decision and what benefits do you think all games and dlc (in an ideal world) being multiplat would have?
