SvennoJ said:
All agreed. |
Indeed. While pricing, marketing, and other factors are also hugely important, you're not going to get people to buy your system if it doesn't have exclusive games to entice people to buy it, and that's a big motivator to provide quality, unique experiences you can't find elsewhere. Nintendo was already on their A-game 40 years ago. While third-party games were largely exclusive in the 8-bit & 16-bit era (mostly by necessity given how incredibly different consoles were back then in terms of specifications), Nintendo was already hard at work putting out their own in-house games, first with ports of their arcade games and later perennial franchises like Super Mario, Zelda, and Metroid. Even back then, the list of bestsellers was dominated by first-party Nintendo games, even if those games represented a much smaller share of total software sales compared to now. Nintendo's games have always been the backbone of their systems, even back in the day when they shared much of the spotlight with third-party games published by the likes of Capcom, Konami, Square, and Enix.
Even on Sony's end, they've long understood the importance of exclusive games, even if they haven't been as reliant on them as Nintendo has been. Back in the 90s, they correctly assumed that discs would supplant cartridges (a CD could hold almost 11 times as much data as the biggest N64 carts for only a tenth of the cost, which made the format appealing to third parties), and many developers released games exclusively on PS1 to take advantage of the system's CD format. Sony also worked closely with many third parties, directly publishing and marketing multiple third-party titles including the output of Eidetic, Insomniac, and Naughty Dog, all three of which they would later acquire as in-house studios. They even published and marketed Final Fantasy VII, probably the most important title on the PS1, in North America & Europe.
While their major first-party offerings weren't as abundant back then, they were developing their own games out of the gate and already created or acquired a handful of studios, namely Polyphony Digital, Psygnosis, 989 Studios, and Japan Studio. They knew they couldn't rely on third-party exclusives forever, so they expanded their roster of first-party studios and for the past 10-15 years have put out some of their most well-regarded and successful games, with first-party software sales hitting new records on the PS4.
I'd argue that MS understood this as well, but just went about things the wrong way, taking too long to really expand their first-party efforts. They knew the Xbox needed a killer app if anyone wanted to buy one, and they got one from recently-acquired Bungie. Halo CE was to the Xbox as what Super Mario Bros. was to the NES. MS did help co-fund, publish, or gain exclusivity rights for multiple third-party games throughout the 00s, but they neglected their first-party portfolio for the longest time. In the latter years of Gen 7, the 360's slate of first-party games had been mostly whittled down to Halo, Forza, and Fable (they also owned Gears, but it was still being developed by Epic at the time). By time they put serious effort into expanding their first-party portfolio, the damage from the botched lead-up to and release of the Xbox One had already been done.
Maybe if they had a lot more in the way of must-have games it could have helped things, but now they've entirely given up on having Xbox exclusives, with seemingly all of their games, including their heaviest hitters like Halo, Gears, and Forza, coming to PlayStation. This has resulted in Xbox becoming entirely redundant, which, along with price hikes (that to be fair aren't entirely their fault thanks to tariff BS), has completely tanked Xbox sales. Unless you really, really like Xbox and feel you've sunk too much into the brand, there's not much reason to buy an Xbox anymore. As someone who played the hell out of Halo CE & Halo 2 on the OXbox, mained on the 360 in Gen 7, and still ended up getting more games on Xbox One than PS4, I'm seriously considering not even buying the next-gen Xbox and buying just a PS6. I'll keep my Series X since my social circle is all on there and I still play older Halo games regularly with some of them, but I'm going to be extremely hesitant to spend hundreds, perhaps upwards of a thousand dollars based on some speculation, on a console that has precisely zero exclusive games.
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In accordance to the VGC forum rules, §8.5, I hereby exercise my right to demand to be left alone regarding the subject of the effects of the pandemic on video game sales (i.e., "COVID bump").
