| ZenfoldorVGI said: It's part of their short term coasting strategy. Dropping support of 3rd parties in favorable of much higher earnings potential by investing that capital into 1st party games. The side effect is that Sony won't be seeing many 3rd party exclusives, like they did during the PS2 years. The positive is Sony's first party games will potentially be more frequent and higher quality. I think it's a bad move. It brings the Playstation brand down, not having many 3rd party exclusives. The end goal is to become similar to Nintendo, and I can tell you, Nintendo is very successful, but most people hate on Nintendo's lack of 3rd party support. I don't think it's an even trade. I believe that Sony is trading 3rd party exclusives for 1st party profit. I think that is the reason Sony lost DMC, GTA, FFXIII, and Tekken, and why they will continue to bleed 3rd party exclusives as long as they have them to lose. |
An exclusive is an exclusive, no matter if it's first or third. The issue with third party exclusives is that they don't always stay exclusive. The best deal you can work out with a third party is either publishing rights or else a year of timed exclusivity. Even publishing a title doesn't always ensure exclusivity, as shown through Vampire Rain. Microsoft published the title for the 360, yet it showed up on the ps3 a year later.
There was really nothing Sony could do about third party exclusives anyway. Do you have any idea how many millions they would've had to throw down on the table to keep all of those franchises exclusive? Probably more than it's costing to develop Killzone 2, God of War III, and Gran Turismo 5 combined. There's just too much money to be made on the 360 for developers to pass it up, and Sony didn't feel like taking the hit.
And this way, they're still getting these third party in addition to a bunch of excellent first party titles like the aforementioned. In the end, they get more games on their platform, because they still get the "lost" exclusives.
Bolstering their first party assets was the right choice. They already owned or were working with the majority of their studios last gen, and the only things that have changed is a few acquisitions (Guerrilla Games, Evolution Studios, Zipper Interactive - all of which were already Sony exclusive developers anyway), second party deals (Media Molecule, Quantic Dream), and the bolstering of team sizes (I've heard crazy things about the number of animators working on God of War III). Bolstering team sizes would've been necessary making the leap to next gen anyway.
