Leaked Bungie contract basically confirms Fall 2013 Xbox 720 release

[Reasonable]

fillet said:

VGKing said:

d21lewis said:

Dallinor said:
Why alienate a section of the market by releasing only on the 360/720 for the first game? Hasn't seemed to have worked out too well with other IP's this gen.

Saints Row, Dead Rising, Bioshock, Mass Effect, Call of Duty 2, Lost Planet, Ghost Recon Advance Warfighter

The only real success there is Call of Duty. But COD 2 came out as a 360 launch title while PS3 didn't exist yet. 
Mass Effect sells so much less on PS3 though. It's clear that the 360-exclusive ME1, and late ME2 port damaged the sales of ME3 on PS3.

If all 3 ME games were to be released on PS3 and 360 simultaneously the franchise as a whole would have been much more successful than it is now.

I disagree strongly with those sentiments, Mass Effect just isn't the type of game the core PS3 gamers are willing to give a chance. Just like old school type gameplay games always sell better on the PS3 because the Americans don't want to play anything that isn't a shooter.

Personal opinion counts for nothing here those be the facts, and the analysis of sales for these types of games prove my point.

To say Mass Effect suffered badly in sales because the first one wasn't on the PS3 is simply guesswork and conjecture. Of course it suffered somewhat that goes without saying but not to the degree implied by many.

TBH I think you've got it backwards.  The "facts" based on other titles with similar timed excusive background is that sales are impacted if the brand and IP is associated with another platform for 12 months or so.  Uncharted, CoD, Battlefield and plenty of other supposedly modern, western games sell just as well on PS3 (ratio of sales to regional install base) as on 360.

So I'd say the genre/gameplay of Mass Effect wasn't the issue - RPGs and TPS sell fine on PS3 - but the lack of Mass Effect on PS3 hurt the IP badly.  Remember Mass Effect had carry over saves that forced Bioware to create that interactive comic to try and fill in the blanks.  The whole design of the franchise is such that not having a full ability to carry over a character from part 1 through to part 3 was always going to hurt PS3 version.  Now if we'd all known that in the end the carry over would turn out to be meaningless then maybe it would have been a different story.

 

On Topic - very interesting to see that kind of detail.  Looking at the platforms I see the only consistent one is PC - I think I'll be getting this on PC assuming as the titles release that holds true.