I'd prefer no exclusives TBH.  As a mainly PC gamer they're somewhat alien to me.  However I prefer a full exclusive to timed.  Full is clear from the beginning and doesn't confuse or mislead the consumer (which is my beef with timed exclusives).  You know God of War is on Sony platform, you know Mario is on Nintendo, etc.

Timed exclusives jerk the consumer around.  They are intended to misslead you as to what platforms the title will be on for a period of time and IMHO are a real denial of service.  A true exclsuive - while not to my tastes either - isn't really a denial of service as the service was never going to be there in the first place.

I admire your bold argument around this but humbly submit it's false and sadly doesn't hold up.  To deny service you are withholding something that could be available, not something that will never be available.  MS aren't denying me Halo on PS3 because it will never (and I know it will never) be on the platform, however they did deny me access to GTA IV DLC and Bioshock for a while.

I'm not pointing the finger as MS though, I'm talking about any timed exclusives.  On consoles, given the competition around platform that doesn't exist on PC, I accept that IP will be owned and may be exclusive, but for me that should be the limit.  Full, true exclusive or nothing.  Timed simply affects the consumer, and I put the consumer ahead of the corporation in my views on such stuff.

Good arguement though, as ever.

Yup, it's all buisness.
It may be a waste of money, but it's MS's money to waste, and they seem to think it helps.
They definitely need better first party stuff though.

1. Full exclusivity vs partial? You'd prefer full exclusivity to partial which I understand. However theres still a major question as to whom takes responsibility here. Is it Microsoft whom proposed the deal or the developer who accepted the deal (and the deception in your mind). That is a seperate issue entirely. In many countries the prostitute bears the responsibility for the transaction and not the customer. I think this is an appropriate analogy considering how many consider this behaviour to be 'whoring'.

2. The difference between purchasing a company and renting a partial period of exclusivity is the terms of denial of service to those who fall outside of the platform. People who enjoyed Crash Bandicoot were forever denied the chance to play excellent Crash Bandicoot games when Sony purchased Naughty Dog. People on the PC and Mac especially had Halo taken away from them when Microsoft bought Bungie. Less deception but greater impact. This issue is more than just deception, PR decieves all the time. One can argue that constant denials of a price cut led many people to purchase consoles weeks or months before a cut of $50-$100 which is an out of pocket deception.

3. Im not pointing the finger at anyone either. I can understand that you'd probably be ok with the dealing if it was upfront with you as to the terms of the arrangement and the period of exclusivity. At least with GTA IV there was some clarity in that Microsoft gave money to Take 2 in exchange for exclusivity on the downloadable content.In addition to this, people ought to understand the unwritten nature of the agreements now. Its an unwritten rule that a game which is released exclusive without an extensive known agreement will eventually come to other systems. I propose that in general there is no longer any deception because people know the whole story now. I feel we're talking more about the nature of past deception rather than present deception.

Im not against consoles as a platform, but I am against the idea of a console manufacturer buying up talent. This to me is a greater sin than merely renting a developer for a fixed term. Consoles are naturally monopolistic entities in that even multi-platform games are still somewhat held to a limited degree of exclusivity to a platform and they aren't portable to the same degree that PC games are. However on the PC platform I can and do act against entities like Intel and Nvidia especially who act against the best interests of the openess of the PC platform. When there are such things as Nvidia exclusive general purpose Direct X MSAA code which interferes with the operation of ATI graphics cards and their performance I do react. My response is that I will never buy another Nvidia graphics card or PhysX based game whilst these issues are unresolved. I've forgiven Intel to some extent due to the concessions they made for AMD and the payout. Whilst I don't like timed exclusivity, I have to see the pros and cons of it in terms of the nature of the market and the benefits to all gamers as well as the negative side.

I have enjoyed our discussion! I hope to keep discussing this and other things with you in the future. Im not interested in proving anyone wrong, I just like to expand my knowledge and experience by greater understanding of other points of view.

"Uncharted 2 cost like $20M I believe. Gears 1 cost $10M (and you can quote me on that one) Microsoft paid $50M for Episodes of Liberty City, and that's going to be on the PS3 soon.
Cost effective to not make 1st party IPs instead?"

Wow Bm, never knew that >

Troils? :)

I always enjoy our discussions!

I guess it's down to personal preference.  If a company either owns the studio and IP or comissions and supports it fully then I figure fair enough, even though that limits titles to certain platforms.  Timed exclusives for me are simply missleading for the consumer.  You see 'Only on 360' etc. then suddenly it's 'not really, sorry, we meant multi-platform'.  In the end you're playing to without information from the end consumer, which is what I don't like.

Obviously in business there's always some element of trying to hold back the competition and give yourself a favourable edge, be it exclusive content, features, or whatever, but it becomes a concern for me when it so obviously affects the end customer and not in a favourable manner.

I don't know though, I don't really think it's misleading. When some limited exclusive game was released, and it says "only on xbox", that's a truthful statement. It's not like they're saying "will only be on xbox, ever", there's a big difference. It would be silly to hold that kind of double standard to everything. You can only judge this sort of thing based on the present. To judge it beyond that is kind of unfair, and unreasonable.

I disagree completely.  Take Bioshock.  It launched as a 360 exclusive, every impression given was that it wasn't ever going to be on the PS3.  At the time that was the only impression given, and it was misleading as it was coming to the PS3 after a period of contracted exclusivity which forced this information to be withheld from the buying public.  This sort of thing has to be judged as it was, not in retrospect when we know it was timed.  I think you know as well as I the impression given in these cases, particularly early on before it became apparent that many of these so called exclusives were in fact only timed.

Even with DLC such as GTAIV the impression is that the DLC is for 360 only, paid for by MS, etc. then low and behold it's not - it was timed.  This misleads the consumer, period, which is why it is a poor business practice, whoever does it, whether Sony with Ghostbusters in Europe or MS with titles like Bioshock globally.

It's clear many people thought these titles/DLC would never hit the PS3 and were therefore mislead by the nature of the timed exclusive - look at the Japanese resoponse to ToV, etc. in that region I'd say once the whole timed approach was exposed it hurt the 360's brand due to the negative perception of the tactic.  Those consumers sure felt mislead.

It's not whether for that period it's only available on one platform, it's the fact it's known to be coming to another and that fact is surpressed that clearly misleads.

You talk about impressions as if they're factual statements given by a company, but people assume whatever they want from these impressions. It shouldn't be on the company to lay everything out for you cut and dry, especially when such things would hurt their business.

Just like when companies like Sony almost lie to their investors "We'll turn profit next quarter". They spin it so that they can restore investor confidence. MS doesn't even spin anything (in regards to this exclusive thing at least), they just omit certain things. Spinning the truth, or omitting parts of the truth, which do you really think is worse?

As for the Japanese response thing, the Japanese seem to hate everything MS anyways. It doesn't matter what they do over there, the Japanese will probably never trust MS anyways, which is just silly to me.

In the end, all companies do whatever they can to get ahead. Even Sony and Nintendo and plenty of other companies resort to these tactics. At the end of the day, mostly all that matters is money. As long as you understand and appreciate that, then something like this whole timed exclusive thing shouldn't even faze you.

MS haters will always be MS haters, and they like these sorts of things to justify their disdain. Most people don't even care about all this. "Oh Bioshock is on PS3 now? Cool"

I think the biggest reason why timed exclusives is because they have been successful Bioshock, Lost Planet, Ninja Gaiden all have out preformed Sony. With all but Ninja Gaiden 2 doing better than 2-1 sales. The reason why this is important for Microsoft is often multiple console owners will pick up a copy on 360 rather than wait for the PS3 version. Second, when the 9 months or what ever is up there are a lot of new games out that command money from PS3 gamers so either buy a game that may or may not have been awesome months ago or buy something new.