| Squilliam said: It is better to have a Gears of War in the hand in 2006 than it is to have 4 Uncharted 2s or God of War 3s released in 2010. It is also better to have one Halo 3 in the hand in 2007 than it is to have a dozen exclusives with an average sell through of 1.5M each. You as a game buyer would also prefer one sublime game to three good games, wouldn't you? For starters that sublime game costs $60 whereas three good games would cost $180 assuming of course you don't sell any. You can't look at the number of games/exclusives released or even their metacritic to say how good a first party has been. You need to also look at the number of hours sunk into each title. It is better for the game player that the exclusives released are both excellent and time sinks. Halo 3 for instance with >10M sold @ > 100 hours average is clocking at over a billion hours played. Those are McDonalds numbers. You can't say that they are short of any exclusives if people are still putting hours of game time into them today, a game is still worth something if it is still being played. Now as for I.P. Well they are coming. You have to remember that a game with a new engine can take upwards of 3 years to make. So if they dedicated their teams to making new I.P for 2011 then they would have had to have started in 2008 or 2007 to make it for 2011. There is a significant time lag which must be accounted for. Thats the reason why Firebird Studio, Lionhead team 2, 343 studio and Rares teams have hardly been heard from. It is also the reason why new Kinect games don't really take advantage of Kinect, the engine technology is simply too new. I remember seeing the Unreal engine splash logo on a few of the games. |
I completely disagree. As a gamer, I would much rather have 3 very good exclusives to a single good and popular game. I'd much rather have the choice and the variety. Is money an issue? Possibly, but I'd still rather be spoilt for choice then have only a small set of games to choose from. For the console manufacturer it can also be beneficial as you're bringing in users and customers with diferent tastes which can increase sales of all software in a range of genres.
Also, your point about number of hours spent on the titles is true, but just because their are more titles out their doesn't mean people don't devote large amounts of time into those titles. The content available in Sony and Nintendo exclusives is more than enough to keep people playing for over 100 hours, and many do.
