Exclusivity is stupid, having more than one dominant console is also pretty bad too.
In the age of online gaming it doesn't help anyone at all if the networks are not interlinked and you cannot play with people on PSN or Xbox Live if you've got the other console. This means that one online network has to win so that everyone with a console can play with anyone else who has a console as well. How does having multiple online networks help us as consumers of content? Must I split my time between two consoles to play with friends who have Xbox 360s or PS3s? Must I buy a game twice to play with people on two different consoles as well? We're far better off having just a single online gaming system.
As for the content, people say that the PS1/PS2/SNES/NES had overall the best libraries. Well overall they also had dominant shares of the market. In terms of variety if theres a large pool of potential consumers then you've got the biggest room for innovation and potentially unprofitable but risky ventures. In addition to this, if the content doesn't compete with content on other consoles it reduces competition and doesn't increase it. Right now the arguments for exclusivity are evaporating because we're seeing multiplatform games with graphics and gameplay coming right up and competing head-on with exclusive content and indeed beating it in many cases. Competition breeds great content, but exclusivity isn't about competition its about running away from it.
In the next generation the performance available will be such that even if one console has half the performance of another it won't really matter as most people won't really care for the difference so long as they get the game to play. 720P vs 1080P? Most consumer tests I've heard of don't give much of a bonus for the latter over the former and yet that represents more than a doubling of 3D performance to reach that target. See there are people whom do care, but they care to the extent that they have a gaming PC and they aren't so much represented on the console stage.
If Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo/Other dominate the market to such an extent that the other consoles are non-factors then we will again have a massive quantity of content available to the one console, and those extra console purchases can instead go to buying great content for the one system. If say the Wii had dominated the console industry completely and you'd spent $1000 of the money you would have spent on the PS3 and Xbox 360 on games, thats 20 titles right there and a lot of very happy game publishers whom would be churning out great content at an even faster pace than what we have now.
Tease.
