With so many rumours lately about highly exclusive AAA games becoming timed exclusives only, could it be that 3rd party console exclusivity is dead?

If great games are costing $10-50 Million to create over 2-5 years, can anybody really afford exclusivity?  If you are a software publisher looking for a 10-20 times return on the investment what is your incentive to make exclusivity?  And with players demanding more and more from each game (Graphics, Sound, Story, Fun, Roam Free Sand Boxing, Multi-player, User Creatable Content, Co-op, Maps, Gameplay, Intensity, etc.) will games not continue to climb in cost/complexity/scope and therefore make exclusivity even rarer?

Sure, low budget games can be made exclusive easily...  But, large budget games need someone to fund them and then release them...  When you are funding them to make money doesn't it just make sense to make the game for more then one console?

What do you think?

Well, there's FF XIII, FF Versus XIII, MGS 4, Disagea 3, Mass Effect, No More Heroes ......

I think they are dying slowly but surely. The only ones that will survive are the ones that console makers literally cannot afford to lose. For example, people talk about a lot of 'nail-in-the-coffin' exclusive losses for the ps3. The only one i think would come close to that is FFXIII, which is why sony will pay literally whatever they have to to keep it exclusive. The same goes for blue dragon and lost odyssey, microsoft was willing to pay a bundle in order to maintain a glimmer (very small one) of hope in Japan. If those titles didnt exist microsoft would no longer be in japan, and if the 360 was expecting FFXIII then there would be much higher uptake rates in all territories thanks to its lower price point

As long as the Wii is around there will be 3rd party exclusives. That's not really a fanboy statement, it's just that there are Wii games than just won't work on other consoles as well (Dewey's Advanture) in just the same way there are DS games that wouldn't work on the PSP.

Back in the NES/SNES days it was about as expensive to develop an entirely new game as it was to port an existing game due to the quantity of assembly code, the proportion of work that programmers represented at the time, and that most of the graphical assets required a ton of rework in order to be used on another platform.

The N64 and Playstation's increased development costs, increased reuseability of code and graphical assets made porting more worthwhile but few developers took advantage of it because the cost rarely justified the return.

The Gamecube, PS2 and XBox's increased development costs, increased reuseability of code and graphical assets made porting the common approach for most middle of the road properties; if you were producing a game that would not stand out on a particular platform (but also didn't need the increased exposure of exclusivity) it was important that you released the game on as many platforms as possible.

The cost of development on the PS3 and XBox 360 combined with their (at the moment) low userbases means that it is probably impossible for almost all games to make a decent profit on one platform; if you're Rockstar and you want to sell 15 Million copies of Grand Theft Auto 4 you can't release the game exclusively to either the PS3 or XBox 360 because even if everyone who owned the console bought a copy of the game you'd come up short.