So long small devs begging for some investment their will be exclusives on X360.  One of them is divine divinity 2.

Edit: like Amirnetz listed.

It should be stipulated (for those who can't be assed to open the thread) that some of those games are 'timed exclusive' and it was deemed reasonable to accept them on the grounds of public perception thinking that 'games are released late on PS3'.

But it's a pretty telling perspective - I think it emphatically answers the question with a resounding 'YES'.

Once the PS3 hits a good point (if it hasn't hit already, and I don't believe it has yet), it's pretty much irrevelant how much the 360 has sold as a PS3 version will be profitable anyway. Well, of course some always decide not to release on all platforms unless they actually have to to survive.

Naturally that is only a simplified course of action, but it should give a decent idea. The chance for the 360 to crush the PS3 with 3rd party exclusive anytime soon isn't too great.

for the 360 to do this they need a wii size lead over the PS3. right now i don't see it. especially with the PS3 absorbing 2/5 of the HD consoles hardware sales.

What matters more is the coming years, not the coming months.

Due to rising development costs, they're both going to have to do a lot more to secure any kind of third-party exclusives. We might even see third parties start to shift more of their resources away from the big-budget titles that appeal to their userbases and more towards Nintendo's platforms as they have much higher profit margins. Despite the 360's recent success, it hasn't scored a decisive victory in any way, shape, or form. It's still going to lag in a second place far behind the Wii, and its market share is never going to get to the point that developers will ignore the PS3 install base. Add in those development costs again, and devs are going to need their games to be on both platforms in order to reap the most profits. You don't get that kind of exclusive third-party support by paying for it, you get it by having the largest install base. That being said, both Microsoft and Sony need to find ways to make their platforms more accessible and appealing to people other than core and hardcore gamers.

MS should be more worried about its first party, a department in which they are very weak. If some of their exclusives like Gears Of War, etc start going multi-plat, they'll be in serious trouble.

marketshare is marketshare.

spending 10's of millions of dollars and limiting it to one HD console(27mil base) doesnt make sense when you can put it on both consoles with a potential base of 45million.Square is doing that now, multiplats is the way to go.

I think the exclusivity line this gen would be farther apart than last gen, and the HD consoles are running too close for either one of them to reach it.

It's not just about raw number of units sold. It's also about profits. Take 2 has had a very rough year despite the release of GTAIV.

It wouldn't surprise me if Carnival Games and Mario & Sonic At The Olympics turned more of a profit than some of the biggest 360 exclusives.

It all depends on costs and estimates, people.

First, the companies do have to decide wether they want to produce a 360 or a PS3 game. In this question, the 360 gained a lot recently I guess, because arguments for making a game primarily on the PS3 get rare with the sales advantage the 360 has. There will always be reasons though, like feeding a starving crowd of fans of a specific genre, like it happenend last gen with ToS on the Cube for example.

After that first decision, you have development costs that you know, and you can calculate how much copies you need to sell to break even.

Now you can make this calculation for the secondary console too. You estimate how much a port would be costing, and how high the opportunity costs would be (money you could earn when the porting team was developing another game, money you lose because the release date is later etc.). Then you compare this to your estimated sales and see if it reaches to break even. It's clear that you do it when you can't. When it reaches, there is another question.

How high is the risk? If you are relatively sure how much the game will sell (if it is a sequel, for example), you will decide to port it. If it is uncertain, you probably won't do it and develop another game instead to split the risk. But then it depends also how high the investment is.

If you are developing a high-budget game of which you are not sure how it will sell, you will probably also port it because the porting costs are relatively low compared to the development costs and like that you can make the audience bigger which is important with such games.
On the other hand, a small project will be comparably expensive to port, while it doesn't give you that much profit.


This leads me to the conclusion that, as others have pointed out too, high-budget titles and other AAA games will probably stay multiplatform, as will franchises that are known and that are currently multiplat too. B games though will more often be exclusive for the 360, but there will also be those that will be exclusive for the PS3.
I think it is important to note that it isn't important how big the gap is, as long as it isn't huge (something like the double userbase). Important is only how big the individual userbases are, and if it warrants a release. Thinking about this, it is not to be expected that there will be way more 360 exclusives in the future, because the PS3's userbase can only grow. But this is also not the complete picture because lots of games have been in development when devs still expected the PS3 to become the top-seller, so the current situation can't be taken as a perfect indicator.


I hope this is all more or less clearly explained.

This gen, MS is pretty close to where they want to be. Think about this - has the 360 ever been this close to selling a million in a week? They did it with a price cut - and past exclusive content. They also did it without having to fork over tons of cash and moneyhat a lot of titles. Now, with them earning some serious profit off of the lower costs to make a 360, 2009, they will be cutting checks left and right to secure games/content they know will sell on their system - and keep Sony out in the cold. And based on the fact some devs are going under, they want the money upfront as soon as possible. Sure, they'll miss PS3 sales and may say 'We'll just weather the story - thanks, but no thanks MS' but in these economic times, MS is showing the money and devs want to make their deadline and keep their lights and phone on.

Yes, Mr. Stof, I see MS having even more content in 2009, regardless of how good - or bad - Sony is doing. It's about having the coolest games and content to make pro-Sony fans seriously question their said system.