Of course it was going to be detrimental to Xbox hardware sales to forfeit having exclusives on console. This was never going to be something where the benefit of hindsight was needed.
Similarily, it's going to hurt PS hardware sales in the long run to make first party games available on the PC. But this will be to a much lesser extent than on the Xbox side for two reasons:
1. There won't be day and date releases.
2. One part of Xbox's original strategy in the console space was to move PC players to console by making most Microsoft games outright exclusive to Xbox or at least timed exclusives. The day and date releases are moving the PC-first audience back to PCs altogether, because the Xbox becomes a redundant device. On the other hand, Sony does not have this kind of history for its first party games and by the time their ports appear on the PC, the games in question are usually already to be had for a discounted price on their console.
Pulling a ratio out of thin air, I'd say Microsoft's approach will hurt Xbox sales ten times more than Sony's approach will hurt PS sales. So if it costs Microsoft ten million units in Xbox sales, then it's only one million for Sony. When you then consider the total volume of what these consoles can sell in their lifetime, then it gets even more damning for Microsoft percentage-wise.
But Microsoft is not in this to sell the most consoles according to Papa Phil. On the other hand, we know from last year's January to March quarter that sales immediately matter and need to be announced when Xbox beats PS on a single continent. Yeah... Microsoft is very two-faced in all of this, just like Spencer in that podcast that VGC wrote about earlier this week; that was about exclusives selling consoles and how that isn't really true and stuff like that.
Legend11 correctly predicted that GTA IV will outsell Super Smash Bros. Brawl. I was wrong.
