Interview with Sony's Scott McCarthy.

"The battle for 3rd party exclusives seems to be dwindling down this generation. More 3rd parties are choosing the multiplatform route. You guys have a few in your lineup — No More Heroes and Ar Tonelico 3 come to mind. Is Sony still working with 3rd parties to secure exclusives or…?

We work very closely with our 3rd parties publishers, not necessarily to lock down games exclusively, but to lock up exclusive parts of games. A good example is Batman: Arkham Asylum, where you could only play as the Joker on PlayStation 3. When you make a title exclusive, you limit its promotional power; we don’t want to do that. We want games to be as big as possible — it’s great for the industry. However, we want to make sure that you play it on the best system possible, so we like to take parts of games and make them exclusive to the PlayStation system."

The complete interview can be read here:

http://scrawlfx.com/2011/02/interview-sonys-scott-mccarthy-on-mlb-11-the-show-ps3-lineup-and-3rd-parties

That's a good concept. With studios like Bungie and Insomniac leaving the route of platform exclusivity, it's wise for Sony to start making deals with developers at an early stage, before Microsoft starts doing the same thing similar to their 'timed exclusivity deals' (which, I read, is one of the primary causes why people buy the CoD games for 360 rather than Ps3.)

If Sony does this with some multiplat games, and markets it like the Xbox (the trailers for the DLC in CoD always emphasize the fact that it's coming out for 360 first], then those same people with those mindsets will buy that corresponding multiplat game for the Ps3.

While the synicle part of me doesnt beleive thats the reason, thats exactly how I feel personally which i why i hate timed exclusives.

Keep first party games as distinctions, then give us different bundles maybe to third party games, much better solution than timed exclusivity, thats not good for anybody.

i like that part of the answer. political PR BS for sure but it worked on me. xD

Well for me personally who has a PS3 only, it's good stuff that I get to play the exclusive content like Batman Arkham Asylum, Red Dead Redemption, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, etc.

But I wonder if that helps with selling more PS3 copies. I haven't kept up with the trends but maybe it's starting to work as the gap between the two versions of ACB is considerably lower than it was for ACII.

Not that I'm complaining and they should just continue with thtat.

I'd say this strategy has been a pretty resounding success.  A good amount of the games they've done this for have rewarded them with much more even sales against 360 or even selling more, which is epic considering the userbase.

This sort of stuff is just annoying ¬_¬

Huh?

What's to "huh" about?

Exclusive content is annoying. End of. Even more so when it's "timed" exclusive content...

I'm all for exclusive content on a system, it's much better then timed exclusivity.