I recall hearing lots of people saying " exclusives are bad for gaming "

I've never agreed with the statement but I've heard it lots over the years.

That's different. Obviously exclusives matter for sales of the system. But similarly obviously it would be better for gamers if all games were available for all platforms. So exclusives are important, but at the same time evil.

Veknoid_Outcast said: Strawman: The Thread

I've come across arguments in these forums and the comment sections of news articles that defend the lack of exclusives for the Xbox One yet deny the growing successes of both the PS4 and Switch because of exclusive content.  One user in particular is Snoopy.  I'm not intentionally singling him out, but I'm referring to him as an example of his preference over third party titles and the popularity of some of those titles to justify his denial of exclusive importance.

Steelers fan?

This may sound a bit unorthodox, but I'd say that out of all 3, Sony has most fate in their exclusives given that they are fairly certain that their hardware just needs to be powerful enough (for full 3rd party support) and have fair amount of good exclusives for "if you build it, they will come" approach when it comes to general audience.

Honestly, I don't even like most of their AAA exclusive IPs, but hats off to them.

Is it really the exclusive content that makes both consoles a growing success? I could understand the argument for the Switch, but to say that the PS is a success because of its exclusive content is a big stretch. Sure, it's a factor, but in no way that's the defining reason for that.

I know that my personal experiences are not representative, but from the handful of PS owners I personally know, only one even play exclusive content on it, and the person in question got it because of brand loyalty, not the exclusive content in itself.

If we take that an average PS owner owns ~10 games per console, then how high is the chance that they own an exclusive, if it's not bundled? And did they buy the console just for that? That would be an interesting study.

I might have implied that it was the defining factor which wasn't my intent.  But it's arguable to say that the PS3 was the "comeback kid" of last gen.  The clearest reason I can conceive of this were the exclusives.  That would help support the argument that this also applied to the PS4 seeing that similar if not the same franchises what were exclusively on the PS3 are now on the PS4.

I think exclusive content is very important to the point, that these days a system without major exclusive content would be struggling. That said much more factors are needed for success, exclusive content alone is also not enough.

But you mentioned a friend that bought PS for brand loyalty. This is interesting. I think brand loyalty is managed by many things in the public perception. As exclusive games take a major spot in public perception, this influence the brand image very strong. More so: even if a multiplat gains a lot of attention, it's image will not influence either console brand image, as it is on multiple platforms. So exclusives get a big influence on brand image of the system while multiplats are irrelevant for that, even if the exclusives sell only a small portion of what all games sell.

A thread about consoles exclusives and no mention of the Switch ?

Oh, I don't doubt that exclusive content is important, just that in my personal experience I know people who bought a PS just because it has a better presence? than its competitors, at least where I'm from (Slovenia). I had a chat with a store employee about why their PS game section is 3 times bigger than the Xbox section (Nintendo is half of Xbox, even) and he told me that it's a directive from above, despite them selling about the same total number of copies for PS and Xbox.

As for brand loyalty, I agree that the present exclusives play a major part in forming that perception, although it's not the only thing that does. I stood with Xbox for their achievement system and controller, personally.