Well, MS has bought quite some smaller studios, so the need for moneyhats is reduced.

Other than Phantasy Star Online 2 just 2 months ago...

What is this bullshit? There was a thread about the Sega/MS rumor, you even posted in it. https://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread/242518/rumor-according-to-xbox-fan-microsoft-will-rebrand-xbox-series-x-to-sega-series-x-in-japan-edit-sega-announcing-arcade-cloud-cloud-gaming-for-arcade-store/1/#18

One, there was hardly anyone in that thread, like five people or less, talking about MS buying out Sega and making their IPs Xbox exclusive. And most of those people are not even “MS fans”, they were hoping for that to happen just to see the meltdowns. Secondly the thread was about a partnership for naming the XSX in Japan, it had nothing to do with buying exclusive IP rights. Are you implying that MS and Sega forming a partnership to name the console something else in Japan is the same as outright buying Sega and making them exclusive? lol What a silly post. Lastly who is defensive about a timed exclusive? Someone corrected the user about FF7R part one being a timed exclusive. Seems pretty straight forward.

But MS helped to bring it over, same with what they are doing with Korean studios.  Heck Spencer said they want to bring it over to the West and it will be on more platforms than xbox one:

Spencer simply revealed that, “Yes, it’ll [PSO2] end up on all platforms, that’s not the point. To me, the point was to have Sega back on our stage, it’s been a while, with a franchise that I think can be relevant.” So there we have it: Phantasy Star Online 2 PS4 in the west is happening, but we just don’t know when that will be. Also, note that it might just be limited to the US; there’s no guarantee it’ll come to Europe yet.

Yeah. That type of exclusive from third party devs make sense. There is no problem with that. 

This thread is just wishful thinking all over the place. I expect the opposite. This gen was the first one when PC, Xbox and Playstation consoles has become way too similar in terms of hardware architecture. And a lot of tools has become available throughout the gen that streamline multiplatform development. One of the most notable being Unreal Engine 4. Even despite Playstation crushing Xbox in sales this gen, a lot of big and medium-sized Japanese franchises has started appearing on Xbox by the end of the gen with Xbox often seen as having no audience for such games. Kingdom Hearts, Yakuza, Tales of (which except one entry moneyhatted by MS always skipped Xbox), Valkyria Chronicles, Bamco stuff, all previously being console exclusive or even fully exclusive to Playstation, all went multiplatform. Persona is going to Steam and probably will come to Xbox as well in the future. Because with a modern dev tools, there is no real reason to leave any platform left out. It's just unneeded lost sales. The only way I can see this happening is if Xbox Series X flops in terms of sales in a big way or Sony buying third party exclusivity which they can't afford to do that much as they won't have that much money for it.

The thing with PSO2 is that Microsoft provided Azure servers to SEGA for western release. Without this, the game would have never gotten the infrastructure to run on in the first place.

DQXI was not even timed exclusive. It also released on 3DS alongside the PS4 in Japan.

Its not weather or not a dev wants to support the entire industry or just the consoles, its the point of grasping as much as you can as the bigger the audience equals the more chance of sales. Example: Why should a dev choose to develop a game on 50m consoles compared to selling there game on 150m consoles? If the platform holders want to spend their money to keep it off other systems, than it becomes anti-consumer and a loss of sales as 1 system does not make up the pedigree of the gaming industry. Do we want our favourite games being locked up? because it easily goes both ways in this business. What Sony locks up will push Xbox to lock up games and than we get a snow ball affect where all platform makers are buying the 3rd party games and your libraries will be all over the place.

Anyway will wait and see, I have no doubt Sony will want to buy as many 3rd party games as possible to showcase their new SSD technology. I am also sure this will lead to competitors counter reacting and doing the same. Time will tell.

I agree. Locking up games, just so the other platform can't have them, sucks. But I'm all for it if it means the game won't be held back and won't have stinking elevators across all platforms.

For a developer it doesn't always make financial sense to support everything. Development should be faster and cheaper if they only target ps5 (if what they say about the ps5 devkit is true). Also some games just don't sell on certain platforms. Games like Splatoon or Animals Crossing probably would sell like ass on anything but a Nintendo console. However, it took a lot of effort to port Witcher 3 to the Switch and it barely sold 700k copies, compared to 11m on the ps4.