| arcelonious said: I personally do not think that going multiplatform is hurting franchises, when there are so many factors that could influence the difference in sales (e.g., different install base sizes, changes in entries for each franchise, shifting trends in gamer interests, growing apppeal from competition (such as the shift of Western RPGs from PCs to consoles in the past two generations), etc.). |
Well, I never really postulated that the franchises became shit because of going multiplat. Rather, I'm making the argument that going multiplat hurts the brand through loss of exclusivity hype, loss of exclusivity impulse buy, and perceived drop in sales.
When you then add costs of porting through time and energy (when they could be spending those 4-6 months creating more content), they really are taking away from the game and well, not getting a whole lot out of it. Plus, it must surely be a headache for them. Need better engines to port, more developers, etc, and then have to deal with hardware discrepancy limitations, and fans criticizing your ports and programming efficiency, coupled with 4-6 months of lost content....it must be stressful. I believe most if not all of these titles could have earned just as much staying exclusive.
Someone said it earlier, that somehow devs became convinced that by staying exclusive they would lose customers on top of potential customers, where in actuality they would be saving themselves quite a bit of effort and resources and come up with similar profit margins (on top of possible financial and development assistance by the console manufacturer).
