Ask yourself the following question:

If you were to develop a game and estimate that you can sell 1 million copies lifetime... Would you rather A) take home, say, $12 million in profit after all is said and done (over the life of the game's sales)-- i.e. marketing, distribution, development, etc., OR B) Perhaps get a guaranteed $12 million profit check up front, regardless of sales (and development/marketing is, of course, covered completely) and STILL get whatever income benefits come from launching it as an exclusive.

Everyone keeps saying that moneyhatting is dumb for the developer. I can assure you that if the contract does not more or less guarantee some benefit greater than that which the developer would get if they struck out on their own, they simply wouldn't do it.

I love how everyone here berates these decisions which are made behind closed doors and with a plethora of accountants from both sides making sure it is in the best interest of each party to do the deal. You can bet your bottom dollar that whatever MS offered SE for SO4 exclusivity is greater than SE feels they can achieve if they strike out on their own. Otherwise, they simply wouldn't do it. That's business 101, folks. Hate MS all you want for ponying up the dough (and SE for taking it) but if you were the exec and the deal was put in front of you, you'd take it, too. Time to get off the soap box.

not sure about world wide but yeah lots of people who had only a ps2 last gen went with 360 this gen. I personally know over 15 people that were die hard ps2 guys and bought a 360 over a ps3.  Now i know not everyone did this but i think throwing the figure around that eventually all the old ps2 owners will upgrade to ps3's if a little off cause many of them have already bought 360's

that said i think SO will do pretty well but not massive numbers.  People are putting a little too much stock in the selling power of this game.  I see somewhere between 700k - 1 million WW sales lifetime if its stays exsclusive.  a couple hundred thousand more if it goes multi-plat

Timed exclusivity gets both parties what they want.  MS's dealings with SE has proven that time and time again.

Star Ocean was born on the Super Nintendo. The series should have stayed on the system it originated on. Actually Final Fantasy did too and a lot of other games. Why did those games move to a different console and alienate their fans?

Nintendo and Sega should be the only videogame companies alive today and allowed to make game consoles. Sony and Microsoft both need to leave videogames alone. Microsoft needs to go back to making OSes for Sega and Sony needs to go back to making CD drives for Nintendo.

What a n00b. The Odyssey was first, and by rights should be the only console today.

Cut me and I bleed Magnavox!

A lot of Ps2 owners perhaps, but I think you would find it difficult to give proof that "most" PS2 owners switched over to 360.  What you have proven is that 15 people did, and I commend you for keeping track of the purchases of that many of your friends, god knows I can't do the same.  But 15 people in statisctical terms is pretty meaningless, not to mention they're all presumably from the same geographical area since they are all your friends.  In essence, citing your own personal experiences is meaningless because proof that 15 people switched from PS2 to 360 does not convert to the millions of people that "most" would imply.

@Jman

Stop saying unproven guesses as fact, it's annoying.

Microsoft is trying to grab marketshare, so SO4 being a 360 time exclusive, helps the 360. Even if it results in not large sales, it positions the 360 as a console that has everything, unlike what is seen with the PS3 as not apparently catering to every niche. This helps sales of the 360.

It won't do that well in Japan (the usual decent opening week w/ hardware boost, followed by a huge drop in the following weeks)

However in NA, it should sell quite well in theory as NA made up a good portion of SO3 sales and the 360 has double the install base there. However again, you could question the percentage of 360 owners that like JRPG's. (LO could help one argue otherwise)

But yeah, logic says it should have been multiplatform.

 The ps3 is by no means  a sinking ship, if you consider selling 4 million consoles more than the year before a sinking ship, then idk what is wrong with you.

I don't understand how switching consoles guarentees some sort of massive failure.

Devil May Cry never saw an Xbox release. DMC on X360 outsold the PS3 version in North America by pretty decent margins - without any 'home' userbase.

Grand Theft Auto saw very late releases on the Xbox....Never day-and-date with the Playstation versions. San Andreas sold about 8:1 in favor of the PS2 version. The Xbox 360 version of IV still leads the Playstation 3 version by well over 1 million units....Again, with a much lower theoretical installed base than the Sony version.

And there are other examples of similar behavior both for the X360, and for many other generations. Final Fantasy was a Nintendo exclusive until VII....Yet when VII hit, it blew the doors out on every predicessor.

I think the argument of a game being a staple of a particular console, or hardware series, is a very overblown argument. If the game is good, people will buy it. That goes for every franchise, regardless of where it came from. I never saw Sony people argue Fallout 3 sales....It's nearly hit a million, despite the Playstation 3 getting a year-old port of Oblivion, and never seeing a Fallout game before. So it works every way.

Personally, I am very hopeful for Star Ocean 4. With the fact it's a sci-fi series, and involves a decent tale concerning WW3...I think it *may* strike a chord with Western audiences, and do very well for itself here. That's just my opinion, but I'm optimisitic. Time will tell how well SO4 does, but I think 500,000 units is an easy lock for the game.