Ulquiorra4sama said:
TheNarrator said:
The rant against exclusivity made me happy. It's obvious anti-competitive and anti-consumer behaviour, and not enough people give a fuck.
How is it anti-competitive? Doesn't it encourage console manufacturers to make systems game devs actually want to make games for, and doesn't it imply that having good devs make good games would make more people buy your console?
It's one of the reasons i bought a PS3 over the 360; because the PS3 had exclusives i wanted and the 360 didn't and everything else was multiplat or uninteresting.
The heart and soul of capitalism, the reason it's the best economical system we humans have been able to come up with, is competition. However, you can compete in (roughly) two ways: by improving your own product (better quality or lower price), or by spending time and energy to
hinder the competition. Obviously, only the first kind of competition actually benefits the consumer and society in general.
For an AAA developer, there's virtually no technical or financial reason why a game shouldn't be made cross-platform, especially in a generation that uses exactly the same CPU architecture. The cost of porting to all the consoles and PC is much lower than the benefits of reaching a much larger audience. So a game developer will only agree to make something exclusive to a platform when there's considerable compensation.
Exclusivity is a form of anti-competitive behaviour, because it's a case of the console manufacturer spending money to ensure that the competition does not get something desirable. There is no reason why console exclusives can't be made cross-platform, they're only not cross-platform because MS and Sony actually spend money to prevent these games from coming to other systems. This money is not spent on improving their own product but on making the competitor's product less desirable; that's pretty much the definition of anti-competitive behaviour.
