| TheSteve said: Pretty sure a lot of the M$ "timed" exclusives were due to a) M$ having an established market presence b) difficulties coding for PS3. Thus why, even after the wait, Orange Box was unplayable on PS3 until later patches. If M$ outright "bought" exclusives to "ensure" they "never" came out on PS3... then they wouldn't have. |
Companies can't buy permanent exclusivity of a title unless they somehow work out a publishing deal in which they own the name of the title, but even then there are ways around such agreements (turning Ninja gaiden II into Ninja Gaiden Sigma II, for example), so the only real way to ensure permanent exclusivity is to purchase the entire IP.
Both companies have worked out deals for timed exclusivity this gen. You can't try to deny the fact that MS has thrown some money around for exclusives just because the games eventually hit ps3. In order to get a third party IP exclusive to your system, the best you can hope for is timed exclusivity, and that's usually all one of the big three will care about, as after six months to a year, the game going multiplat means little in terms of sales. Permanent exclusivty is next to impossible unless you make the game second party.
Of course, there's direct evidence of this from sources like 2K:
Some games were obviously made exclusive as a result of development struggles (like your Orange Box example, though that version wasn't even handled by Valve), but there are quite a few that weren't.
