| Cerebralbore101 said:
The people that complain the most over exclusives are PC-Only gamers. I've always thought this was funny, because if you can afford a great gaming PC at around $1000 to $1500, then you can afford a $300 console. |
I feel like this is a very poor argument for a number of reasons. For one, not everybody who has $1000 of disposable income has $1300 of disposable income (or $1600 if you factor in the fact that you need multiple consoles to play different exclusives), and even if they do, the value proposition becomes highly skewed when you are spending hundreds of dollars for one or two exclusives (depending on how many exclusives you are interested in). Second, you have to account for all of the differences in the games between a console and PC. There are different communities that you would be playing with, different tools, different online platforms (remember to add in $60 a year to your value proposition if you want to play online), different control interfaces and different technical capabilities.
There is a lot more behind someone saying that they wish x game was on PC than simply whether or not they can afford another console.
That said, to answer your question, yes an exclusive is more anti-consumer than the open platform utopia, and basically by nature, timed exclusives are just companies holding back content for a week or a month or however long. That said, if you consider the monetary side of things, it becomes a little more shaky. Is Bayonetta 2 being Nintendo exclusive anti-consumer when it would have never been released without Nintendo's involvement? Is Super Mario Odyssey being exclusive anti-consumer when it is being used to drive console sales in order to attract games to the platform and ensure that Nintendo is able to maintain competition within the industry and keep freedom when it comes to how they want to utilize hardware?
Ehhhh, I'd argue that not all exclusives are created equal. To determine what is anti-consumer, I'd argue that you have to consider whether exclusivity is a platform holder paying to hold pack content for an out-group; or if it is a platform holder paying to provide content for an in-group. Often we don't have the information to make this distinction and there are still factors regarding the health of a platform and the maintenance of a competitive ecosystem which muddy the waters.
