Aura7541 said:
I find it rather comical that your point was made when you didn't address some of my points. For instance, your assertions are based on data from a month where a much higher proportion of consumers are more concerned about price than anything else. This is a very flawed assessment because consumer habits of December are not representative of consumer habits of January through October, where the habits are more value-oriented. In addition, I mentioned that Mat Piscatella cited the XB1's lack of exclusives for its YOY drop in performance and yet, not a peep from you. If the issue was the lack of citation, then here you go: "To the Xbox One question... baseline demand changes can be explained by two things from the data I look at. First, exclusive content is having an impact, explains a big chunk of the performance change. The other thing the data suggests is that the early announce of One X may be slowing sales a bit over the summer." In May, he credited Persona 5 for part of the PS4's YOY rise in performance:
"I'd peg it to Persona 5 along with momentum driven by other exclusive content and normal price decay. No promotions or anything stands out to me. But we're not talking about huge units of disparity here."
And obviously, you will respond with "But I am only talking about 1st party exclusives. Look at my comment that you responded to". However, your original thesis criticized the notion of "no games or 1st party titles". As a result, Persona 5 is fair game.
For reference, Persona 5 shipped 2 over million copies as of December 1, 2017. It sold about 0.5M in Japan, so it sold around 1.5M outside of the country. Other games had similar performance, at times being even better:
- Nioh shipped over a million after only 2 weeks in the market
- FFXII: The Zodiac Age shipped over 1 million copies as of October 26, 2017
- Nier Automata shipped over 2 million as of September 21, 2017, with about 1.4M copies of them being the PS4 version
- VGC claims that Uncharted: The Lost Legacy sold over 1.5M retail copies
- Horizon: Zero Dawn sold over 3.4M as of April 30
Considering the similarity of these games' sales performances, it is logical to assume that they also played a part in moving some hardware sales. And to conclude my response, I will point out to the IDC's Q3 2017 survey:
 9.6% of the respondents cited exclusive games as one of their top 3 reasons of buying a console. That is not far behind of console bundle price, which got 13.3%. And before you go "Well, it's only 9.6%", exclusive games can play a role in the other categories the IDC mentioned. For instance, under "Bundled games or special edition hardware", the bundled games may be exclusives. The same applies to "The games catalog as a whole". The games catalog includes exclusive games, though exclusives may not play a sole part in the purchasing decision. There are also a bunch of games that are on the PS4 and other platforms, but not the XB1 such as Nier Automata.
In addition, this survey only looked at American gamers during Q3 2017. It would be logical to assume that if IDC were to hold this survey in Europe or Asia, then the proportion of gamers who cite "Exclusive games" as one of their top 3 reasons for buying a console would be significantly higher. The PS4's exclusive offerings during that quarter were decent, but not as large as Q1 and Q2, especially Q1.
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You make some fair points and I somewhat agree however I can safety say even if Persona 5 could have been a Multiplat the PS4 sales still would have increased. Sometimes you just need games on the shelf, and in some occasions, there are games that can move consoles, Halo being one of them in the past for MS however it all goes back to my point of it depends on how well its marketed, Halo 3's marketing campaigns is what really helped boost the sales with the 360. Destiny had a huge marketing campaign and its sales skyrocketed and it didn't matter of the quality or state the game. Weather there 1st party or 3rd party makes no difference.
Sony market there 1st party games very well while MS seem to market 3rd party games more. Halo Wars 2 actually was marketed well and it was a 1st party Exclusive, it still didn't move consoles. In the end a system will move depending on price point focus and how its advertised. PS4 has had the snowball effect at launch with Sales and its never going to change this generation. Xbox needed a new face lift hence the S and the X which is why the Xbox brand has been doing better these days. They did it all without minimal exclusives on the shelves and still manage to move hardware. That's really my point here.
You can still market a console with exclusives that released in Q1 and Q2 hence why we get many different bundles at different times. Its just Sony make more 1st party games so they market them as such, however you can have big multiplats that are more popular and market them better and they will overshadow 1st party exclusives based solely of advertisements. The best selling games on both PS4 and XB1 are the 3rd party multiplats.
I love 1st party exclusives as much as anyone in here however its not make or break like many want to believe for a console.
