MS had the publishing right to the first 2 games form the get go.

Epic owns Gears of War IP and the MS contract is up...if they really regret making the first 2 exclusive they are free to ignore MS and make it for the PS3 if they want. Only time will tell if Pachter is right.

I'm pretty sure that MS didnt invest in two games in a franchise that hadn't proven itself. The way pachter made it sound was they had a one-game contract and then signed another two game contract for 2+3

I can see his side of thinking.

However, I think exclusivity had a lot to do with Gears' success.

guys we ave seen ff13 metal gear....all these franchises go to microsoft on the 360 i wudnt be suprised if sony is jus a little pissed off and announces gears of war 3 at one their e3's :P

The fact that Microsoft was so lax with Epic during negotiations (letting them keep the IP) is unbelievable. Sony would never, ever, ever make a deal like that with any developer that they are publishing for. Unless it's a niche IP like Heavy Rain. For such a big evil monopolistic corporation, Microsoft has certaintly been getting soft.

If they release it exclusive they can get it out this year, but if they release it multiplatform they would probably have to take a year to get the PS3 version up to speed. They would have to go against Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 on the PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2011 and they would probably lose sales on the Xbox 360 from a delay.

Don't get too worked up about this. Patcher is stating his opinion on the matter, and in some ways it seems to be based on an oversimplified logic that all multiplatform games sell tons more than single platform games. Sometimes that's true, but not always. Because of the efforts of MGS to promote the GeoW series, I don't think that's the case this time.

LOL...considering that they OWN the engine, which is a major cost to developing, why don't they just start a new mulit-platform IP? The article is the typical nonsense this guy puts out, but he's an "expert" on gaming. He's flatout wrong a majority of the time, but never the less, still making more money than nearly all of us on this board...amazing.

“I don’t I think that Microsoft has a contract to make sure that they get that sequel, But I think Epic regrets signing that contract,” the wedbush Morgan analyst said. “You’re up to 11 million PS3 in the US and probably similar number in Europe, you got a 20 million addressable market with a game like Gears of War, I mean that thing would easily sell 3 or 4 million on the PS3; that’s a lot of profit.”

PS3 exclusives hardly does that. Also, Gears is heavily marketed by Microsoft, that's why it sold so well on the x360.

Without the ammount of effort and money that Microsoft is putting, I doubt that Gears would sell 2m on the PS3 or x360.

Patcher obviously doesn't have an inside source otherwise he would Have mentioned it. But even worse is he has some pretty bad logic. The 20 million userbase of the ps3 is shared of course with dual console owners. The ps3 version could probably sell 1 to 2 million but the draw would come mostly from the current 360 userbase. The additional development costs would not justify the increase in sales.