Games should be made "EXCLUSIVE" for one platform again

[captain carot]

People begging for third party exclusivity forget a lot of things:
1. Sales, especially needed sales for a defined budget. Back in the old days, game development was ridiculously cheap compared to today. 8-Bit games usually didn't have more than a handful of developers. Even many PS1 games had really small teams behind them.
Now you have to realize, that not so few classics sold way under a million in the 80's and 90's and yet were huge successes.

2. Business terms. Remember those Nintendo business terms for the NES? Those that led to many of Nintendos problems later on? Those were the main reason for so many exclusive third party games.

3. Market domination, now just look at the PS2. Sonys total domination of the console world. While Dreamcast, Xbox and Gamwecube didn't even sell 60 million consoles combined, Sony wasn't that far from 160 million PS2.

4. Differences and/or similarities in hardware. Remember some of those effects in Super Castlevania IV? Parts of that couldn't be done on a Mega Drive/Genesis. Segas console could do some stuff that Nintendidn't vice versa.
Around the 32Bit era that changed. Not totally though. Developers often had to reprogram or even redo parts of their games for PS1 or Saturn.
Today GPU-technology and API-stuff is pretty much the same if you compare it to that time. Of course, there still are differences, but not to the same extent.
If you look at game engines, it doesn't matter that much if we talk about in-house tech like Frostbyte or Unreal Engine and Unity, all are extremely scalbale and already ported to basically everything to make development for multiple platforms as easy as possible.

5. Range. Something that might be even more important for small devs. You either need many platforms or really good visibility on a single platform to get your sales. That goes even more for smaller developers.

More or less similar tech and scalability of engines basically take away almost all benefits from platform exclusivity, while developers and gamers can actually benefit from multiplat releases.
If a dev gets decent financing and/or marketing, they might benefit from exclusivity though.