The Death of Platform Exclusive Software

[Wman1996]

Video games are a massive entertainment empire with a complex history. Hardware and software rise and fall, trends change, genres shift.

But I find it interesting that from the end of the seventh generation and the start of the eighth generation, software exclusivity is dying.

No where is this more clear than with Xbox. The Xbox One only has about 11 truly exclusive pieces of software. One of those is Rare Replay, a compilation of older games. Several of the others are Kinect games (which Microsoft killed years ago). And retroactively, some games later get ported to a future piece of hardware. Maybe Halo 5 will be one of those games.

And the Xbox Series S/X is the big shocker. It's a major video game platform and doesn't have a single piece of exclusive software available or announced. Every game on Series S/X you can either play on Windows or Xbox One.

Even the PlayStation 5 only has a tiny handful of true exclusives, with very few announced. 

And of the Nintendo Switch's thousands of titles, less than 80 are exclusive to the platform.

I have a mixed opinion on this whole situation. On the one hand, it seems very pro-consumer. A lot of people don't want to have to buy 2-3 platforms to play games. On the other hand, I feel like we are missing out on titles that take advantage of certain hardware features and controller inputs. But even then, the architectures of consoles is becoming more like PCs.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the PlayStation 6 or 7 is like Xbox where you can play any of the games on at least PlayStation and Windows. It seems like that's where the industry is heading.