Numerical Analysis of the History of Sony/Microsoft Third Party Exclusivity
Or, Sony Says Third Party Exclusivity Is Dead; Reality - They Killed It
Sony hardware PR man John Koller has come out and admitted that console exclusivity is dead - well, third party console exclusivity is dead at any rate. He correctly ascribes it to the high development costs of this generation. Third party developers simply can’t sustain the costs if they solely support one platform.
This is most likely why two-thirds of all Playstation 3 games - 213 of 317 titles so far - also appear on the Xbox 360.
Of course, this is a problem the 360 doesn’t seem to have. Those 213 multi-platform games are in a pool of 605 Xbox 360 and Xbox 360 Live Arcade games. This brings the total percentage of multiplatform titles down to just 35% of the Xbox 360 library.
So how does Microsoft get away with it when Sony cannot?
1) Lower development costs. Even if someone is daunted by developing a fully blown Xbox 360 Game, they can still develop content for Xbox Live Arcade fairly cheaply.
Which brings us to:
2) Xbox Live Arcade. Games can and are distributed through the Playstation Network, and some of them like Everyday Shooter and flOw have even found audiences, but as a service it hasn’t caught on to the same extent of Xbox Live Arcade.
Why? My personal theory is a lack of demo versions. The one game I’ve purchased, Wipeout HD, let me play it first. I can’t say the same for a lot of the other titles on the service. They might be good, they might not be, but I won’t buy a pig in a poke if you know what I mean.
It’s also pretty brilliant to put the option to buy right in the demo version. It stops users from getting out of the game, going to the dashboard, looking up the title on Live and then… wait, what were we doing again?
3) Microsoft actively seeks 3rd party development. Since 2007, Sony has made it clear that they aren’t interested in exclusive content, won’t pay for it and wont assist developers in creating it. So what’s a developer to do? Oh, look, there’s Microsoft waving money at them.
So yes, when Sony says that third party exclusivity is dead for them, that’s correct. What they omit is that they are the ones who actively killed it.
Click “Read more…” for an addendum.
[UPDATE: The author responded to the critics on N4G with the following addendum:
Now then, if you want to exclude all the games that came out in 2005 and 2006 (before the PS3 went on sale) that's pretty easy to do.
The number of multiplatform games drops to 196 / 317 on the PS3 or 61.82%.
The number of multiplatform games on the 360 drops to 196 / 467 or 41.97%.
In these calcs I was trying to be overly fair to the PS3 by including the 21 titles released in 2006 while at the same time removing all titles for the 360 from both 2005 and 2006 (Metacritic only gives the year so it's not possible to tell which 360 games overlapped the PS3 in 2006 and which did not.)
So even with this disparity in favor of the PS3 they're still behind on exclusives by 20%.
If you remove the 2006 PS3 titles as well so you're only comparing games released from 2007 to 2009 you get:
PS3 - 180 multiplatform out of 296 titles. 60.81%.
Xbox 360 - 180 multiplatform out of 467 titles. 38.54%.
So no matter which way you cut it, Sony's antagonistic attitude towards exclusive content has harmed their library depth.]
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The article is right at some point wrong at other
