Numerical Analysis of the History of Sony/Microsoft Third Party Exclusivity

Or, Sony Says Third Party Exclusivity Is Dead; Reality - They Killed It

Sony hardware PR man John Koller has come out and admitted that console exclusivity is dead - well, third party console exclusivity is dead at any rate. He correctly ascribes it to the high development costs of this generation. Third party developers simply can’t sustain the costs if they solely support one platform.

This is most likely why two-thirds of all Playstation 3 games - 213 of 317 titles so far - also appear on the Xbox 360.

Of course, this is a problem the 360 doesn’t seem to have. Those 213 multi-platform games are in a pool of 605 Xbox 360 and Xbox 360 Live Arcade games. This brings the total percentage of multiplatform titles down to just 35% of the Xbox 360 library.

So how does Microsoft get away with it when Sony cannot?

1) Lower development costs. Even if someone is daunted by developing a fully blown Xbox 360 Game, they can still develop content for Xbox Live Arcade fairly cheaply.

Which brings us to:

2) Xbox Live Arcade. Games can and are distributed through the Playstation Network, and some of them like Everyday Shooter and flOw have even found audiences, but as a service it hasn’t caught on to the same extent of Xbox Live Arcade.

Why? My personal theory is a lack of demo versions. The one game I’ve purchased, Wipeout HD, let me play it first. I can’t say the same for a lot of the other titles on the service. They might be good, they might not be, but I won’t buy a pig in a poke if you know what I mean.

It’s also pretty brilliant to put the option to buy right in the demo version. It stops users from getting out of the game, going to the dashboard, looking up the title on Live and then… wait, what were we doing again?

3) Microsoft actively seeks 3rd party development. Since 2007, Sony has made it clear that they aren’t interested in exclusive content, won’t pay for it and wont assist developers in creating it. So what’s a developer to do? Oh, look, there’s Microsoft waving money at them.

So yes, when Sony says that third party exclusivity is dead for them, that’s correct. What they omit is that they are the ones who actively killed it.

Click “Read more…” for an addendum.

[UPDATE: The author responded to the critics on N4G with the following addendum:

Now then, if you want to exclude all the games that came out in 2005 and 2006 (before the PS3 went on sale) that's pretty easy to do.

The number of multiplatform games drops to 196 / 317 on the PS3 or 61.82%.

The number of multiplatform games on the 360 drops to 196 / 467 or 41.97%.

In these calcs I was trying to be overly fair to the PS3 by including the 21 titles released in 2006 while at the same time removing all titles for the 360 from both 2005 and 2006 (Metacritic only gives the year so it's not possible to tell which 360 games overlapped the PS3 in 2006 and which did not.)

So even with this disparity in favor of the PS3 they're still behind on exclusives by 20%.

If you remove the 2006 PS3 titles as well so you're only comparing games released from 2007 to 2009 you get:

PS3 - 180 multiplatform out of 296 titles. 60.81%.
Xbox 360 - 180 multiplatform out of 467 titles. 38.54%.

So no matter which way you cut it, Sony's antagonistic attitude towards exclusive content has harmed their library depth.]

http://www.gamestooge.com/2009/04/15/sony-says-third-party-exclusivity-is-dead-reality-they-killed-it/

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The article is right at some point wrong at other

DO YOU agree with its outlandish claims?

This is why i support games going multiplat

once again, let's ignore the wii because it doesn't exist

I'm a little tired of people, media and norms, saying 3rd party exclusive is dead. You know why they say that? Because 3rd parties focus on HD consoles, and the 2 HD consoles have a close install base. If the Wii were more similar to these and garnered more 3rd party support, or if there were a larger gap in sales between 360 and PS3, no one would be saying this. And next gen, if MS or Sony takes a decisive lead over the other, they'll get 3rd party exclusives. I garuntee it.

Shhhhh, this is a Xbox/PS3 thread, it's taboo to bring up the Wii. :D

Well, Wii gets a lot of exclusives ;)

And all of them that are 3rd party, or almost all, could be considered failures in terms of sales=P  The only exclusives - hell, the only games at all - that sell on Wii are made by Nintendo=/

Exclusivity works best when one console controls 90% of the market and caters to just about every possible target audience.

I don't wanna be that guy, so I'm not going to list to you all of the successful games. Nice attempt though.

I kind of agree. Given the PS1 and PS2 lived off of third party content, I thought it was a ridiculous move by Sony to refuse to pay for it once competition came in (given how much it has helped them in the past).

If they bought exclusive content whilst backing their 1st/2nd party developers, they'd have a much stronger lineup compared with the 360 (I won't comment about Wii lineup here), but right now they are a few games above having a better library then the 360 and a few games short of (depending on who you ask).

Now if they'd done that this generation, they would established plenty of franchises and 1st/2nd party devs for the PS4, which meant that by that stage they could have done a Nintendo and not cared about 3rd party exclusivity (Nintendo do care about 3rd party content, just not as much as the other 2. Probably because they don't need to rely on it).

Instead, they went with Resistance, Heavenly Sword, Uncharted, Motorstorm, Lair, Folklore and Eye of Judgement. They've had ratchet and clank, Killzone 2, GT5 prologue and will have God of war 3 make an appearance from last generation.

But taking out Resistance and Uncharted, their new IP's this generation haven't been stellar (though 2.5 or 3 out of 6 isn't bad. 2.5 or 3 depending on how you feel about HS and Motorstorm).

Had they'd spent money on buying exclusivity, we could have added DMC4, GTA4, FF13 and 13 VS (which we can still add) to that list, it would have looked much more impressive (Though let's not forget of course MGS4).

If they'd had this two pronged attack of 1st/2nd party titles and 3rd party exclusives, they would have looked amazing going into the PS4 (1st party dev's would have looked much better, rather than being something they now over rely on).

I mean, Sony killed the PS3 for the sake of their long term future (blu-ray), why would they make such a silly move as to not secure a competitive edge games wise with a slow move towards internally developed exclusive games. If they'd done that, they would have maintained a competitive advantage over the 360 by having a better exclusive lineup, and could have built a Nintendo-like (doubt they'll ever match Nintendo now) in-house development team.