AussieGecko said:
Squilliam said:
It is better to have a Gears of War in the hand in 2006 than it is to have 4 Uncharted 2s or God of War 3s released in 2010. It is also better to have one Halo 3 in the hand in 2007 than it is to have a dozen exclusives with an average sell through of 1.5M each. You as a game buyer would also prefer one sublime game to three good games, wouldn't you? For starters that sublime game costs $60 whereas three good games would cost $180 assuming of course you don't sell any.
You can't look at the number of games/exclusives released or even their metacritic to say how good a first party has been. You need to also look at the number of hours sunk into each title. It is better for the game player that the exclusives released are both excellent and time sinks. Halo 3 for instance with >10M sold @ > 100 hours average is clocking at over a billion hours played. Those are McDonalds numbers. You can't say that they are short of any exclusives if people are still putting hours of game time into them today, a game is still worth something if it is still being played.
Now as for I.P. Well they are coming. You have to remember that a game with a new engine can take upwards of 3 years to make. So if they dedicated their teams to making new I.P for 2011 then they would have had to have started in 2008 or 2007 to make it for 2011. There is a significant time lag which must be accounted for. Thats the reason why Firebird Studio, Lionhead team 2, 343 studio and Rares teams have hardly been heard from. It is also the reason why new Kinect games don't really take advantage of Kinect, the engine technology is simply too new. I remember seeing the Unreal engine splash logo on a few of the games.
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Before I respond I must say I feel dirty because No Internet Explorer version in my house I can respond to so i have to use Google Chrome for my Lappy which i just d/led and Mozilla for my Desktop (I like change :p )
Back to the point at hand, I said those 4 games in the x 4 scenario would have to be good in their own right. Yes MS has done very very well with Halo's audience. Call of duty has done better. But hey lets not go into semantics.
PS3 fans response to halo is cod, because even on 360 COD is properly more popular and as some people have said is probably more of a casual audience game (my bro in law plays it and he is not what you would call a gamer). Mass Effect is one of those games that people whoever tastes will appreciate it for what it is. That should have been MS and would have if they guaranteed it as an exclusive by buying Bioware when they had the option. Look don't get me wrong I am rapt that PS3 fans get to experience the game if they don't have a good pc or a 360 but I would prefer it to stay on the 360.
Exclusives are important for systems to stay unique. This may stem from my Sega Mega Drive II days vs Nintendo. The games were soooo different it was crazy and that was the good thing. There were obvious differences. If you wanted to play Sonic, Altered Beast and After Burner you got a Sega (which I did, though it was for a present but I grew to love <3) but if you got a Nintendo you did it for the Mario series, starfox series, Zelda series, FF series at the time and so on.
Exclusives used to define systems now Timed bullocks define how pissing contests happen. These forums imo would be a much much friendlier place if we didn't get MGS will go to 360 and will announce it at x or Gears will go multi plat at y. Those conversations suck and bring out the worst in people. In house exclusives help make people understand that that game is for that console. No ifs or buts. Halo is 360, Mario is Nintendo, Drake (i think that is in house) is Sony. It is good to have those. No it is great. If next gen we have 3 consoles (this theory is nintendo is not part of the gen) that are exactly the same, i can see no platform game differences and that would suck.
Last time it took an ET ad to destroy and industry, not saying this will destroy the industry, but its certainly going to bring down competitions between exclusives and without competition we have same thing over and over again, FIFA and COD anybody? These companies know they can get away with it because they don't have serious competition. And that is the sad truth.
So do we need exclusives? hell yes, Does Microsoft need more? If this answer hasn't been given to you in that little piece of information, I don't know what I can do. I think it is obvious. But I will say it anyway, hell yes.
Sorry for the length :-/
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No problem on the length, so long as the content is justifying it. 
Anyway im responding on IE because Firefox crashes too much and I dislike Google for percieved privacy infringement.
Anyway where we differ here is that I see the word 'exclusive' as only part of the story. What you are really looking for is 'exclusive value' or 'exclusive experiences' differentiating between different consoles. For instance Gears of War was the first real current generation blockbuster on the HD consoles, in 2006 that represented a real exclusive experience you couldn't find anywhere else. In 2008 when Gears of War 2 was released that exclusive value had diminished so at that point whether Gears of War was exclusive or not didn't matter so much because as game libraries develop the value of exclusives diminish because the extra value they offer which isn't matched on other consoles is diminished or removed completely.
Where this generation is different to other generations is that the exclusive experiences aren't limited to just the games. In the last generation all the consoles were pretty much the same and the only differentiation was really provided by the games themselves. In this generation you real differences in the systems themselves especially now that Kinect and Move are out. So without the games to differentiate the systems as much the systems still differentiate themselves by the actual physical interfaces, operating systems and online networks. There is no danger in having fewer exclusives because the systems have differentiated themselves to a greater degree than they have in the past couple of generations in spite of the fact that everything is multiplatform with fewer exceptions.
As for fanboys and general riff raff behaviour, well, you'll probably find that the closer peoples values are the more they tend to act out between each other because they feel they are in more direct competition. You'll probably find that the Move / Kinect fans will eventually ignore each other because the target market for the two interfaces are completely different. Had Move and Kinect been identical you'd have probably found that there would be more arguments and fighting because the systems were targeting the same customers and had similar values.
So do I think exclusives are worth it? Well not so much, however whenever a console can bring true exclusive value then thats a good thing. I don't think for instance that Microsoft buying Bioware and subsequently denying people the ability to play a fantastic game like Mass Effect would solve anything because it seriously wouldn't add that much value to the console, the money would be better spent on true improvements to Xbox or Xbox Live instead because that improves the experience of Xbox 360 owners without denying Sony/Nintendo console owners the benefit of future games from Bioware.
