Can the 360 hit the "Exclusivity line"?

[nintendo_fanboy]

It all depends on costs and estimates, people.

First, the companies do have to decide wether they want to produce a 360 or a PS3 game. In this question, the 360 gained a lot recently I guess, because arguments for making a game primarily on the PS3 get rare with the sales advantage the 360 has. There will always be reasons though, like feeding a starving crowd of fans of a specific genre, like it happenend last gen with ToS on the Cube for example.

After that first decision, you have development costs that you know, and you can calculate how much copies you need to sell to break even.

Now you can make this calculation for the secondary console too. You estimate how much a port would be costing, and how high the opportunity costs would be (money you could earn when the porting team was developing another game, money you lose because the release date is later etc.). Then you compare this to your estimated sales and see if it reaches to break even. It's clear that you do it when you can't. When it reaches, there is another question.

How high is the risk? If you are relatively sure how much the game will sell (if it is a sequel, for example), you will decide to port it. If it is uncertain, you probably won't do it and develop another game instead to split the risk. But then it depends also how high the investment is.

If you are developing a high-budget game of which you are not sure how it will sell, you will probably also port it because the porting costs are relatively low compared to the development costs and like that you can make the audience bigger which is important with such games.
On the other hand, a small project will be comparably expensive to port, while it doesn't give you that much profit.


This leads me to the conclusion that, as others have pointed out too, high-budget titles and other AAA games will probably stay multiplatform, as will franchises that are known and that are currently multiplat too. B games though will more often be exclusive for the 360, but there will also be those that will be exclusive for the PS3.
I think it is important to note that it isn't important how big the gap is, as long as it isn't huge (something like the double userbase). Important is only how big the individual userbases are, and if it warrants a release. Thinking about this, it is not to be expected that there will be way more 360 exclusives in the future, because the PS3's userbase can only grow. But this is also not the complete picture because lots of games have been in development when devs still expected the PS3 to become the top-seller, so the current situation can't be taken as a perfect indicator.


I hope this is all more or less clearly explained.