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ElGranCabeza on 28 November 2010
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Seece said:
ElGranCabeza said:

GTAV is not going to be exclusive to anything, it'll launch on PS3, 360, PC and Wii2 in 2012.

L4D3 is also not going to be exclusive. Valve will most likely launch a dual pack L4D L4D2 with all DLC, and maybe new ones, next Fall for PS3, 360 and PC.

The age of exclusives is over, especially for shooters and dudebros, PS3 and 360 userbase is too big and to buy out an exclusive would be too costly. You can expect Gears 3, DQX and Agent to be the last ones, FFvXIII will go to the 360 as well, as will MH3G. IF MS wants to get some 3rd party exclusives and still be profitable with that exclusive, they should look at RTS games and/or Blizzard games with Battle.net. Age of Empires, Civilization V, Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, WoW, etc would be major.

MS get at least half of their exclusives from 3rd partys, if it really did become difficult getting them, they will start buying studios. When they finally do bulk out their first party line up, they won't dissapoint.


MS can still buy out 3rd party exclusive games, but they will have to fork out more money. Put it this way, how much do you think Epic Games got from MS to have Gears 1 2 exclusive? At that time the PS3 was selling like shit and Gears wasn't a household name, so, at a guess, I would say U$20 million for both? Now, fast forward to Gears 3, the PS3 is selling much better and Gears is synonymous with AAA game, so, maybe it cost MS U$40 million to keep that exclusive, a Gears 4 would cost significantly more. Of course this is not just MS writing a check, it's waving royalty fees, paying for advertising, etc etc

Of course MS can buy studios, but, as MS, Sony and Nintendo have shown, it doesn't always pan out. Rareware is a POS developer nowadays, Jaffe and Campbell left Incognito to form their own studio and Incog had to be shut down, Monolith Soft hasn't produced games to the quality that Nintendo expected them to. I really love when people say X company should just buy out Y company when it doesn't really work like that, people don't like the management, leave and then what? You have a whole bunch of IPs and talent less individuals to run them into the ground. Buying studios is not as black and white as most people think it is.