Benny's Blogs

Over the past couple of years, we've seen a radical change in the way developers approach exclusitivity in the gaming industry. People are a lot more hesitant to fish out a multi-million dollar project for the sake of a consoles library. Its a gamble situation. Do you cut a deal with Sony and hope that your product will come out more refined as a result? Or do you conform to the asshole of equality and financial stability, releasing your game on every system you can think of. The latter as we all know, is becoming the increasingly favourable approach to video game development.

It isn't difficult to glance over the industry and find some of these instances. Namco Bandai in particular, have gotten use to giving Sony the big finger, choosing to migrate the Ace Combat franchise over the to Xbox 360 and make Tekken 6 cross-platform. Its not dissimilar from having a friend you've known for ten years, ditch you for Australia in hopes of getting more money there.

This lack of third-party support can be seen across the board, and not just in Japanese development circles. With EA's acquisition of BioWare, has also come the multi-platform status of the Mass Effect franchise, which is likely to find its way to the PlayStation 3 in the sequel.

Even the first Halo originally had plans for release on other platforms, including the PS2 and Dreamcast.

http://au.ps2.ign.com/articles/072/072893p1.html

Exclusives do still exist however, but the industry has recently discovered the phenomenon, of timed exclusives. BioShock, Unreal Tournament 3, Eternal Sonata, Lost Planet, GTA: San Andreas are just a few examples of how the industry is loosing faith in the virtue of loyalty.

There is an exception though, concerning the case of Insomniac. Totally independant from an first-party publisher, Insomniac have developed a strong relationship with Sony over the course of their work. There's nothing stopping them from going off and signing a contract with say, Nintendo, and leaving Sony in the past, but they choose not to do that. In this way, it could be said that Insomniac are the embodiment of how gaming use to be, exclusive, and comfortable in its position.

With most developers now choosing the safer option of the two, it almost makes one nostalgic for the time when you had to pick between either Sonic, or Mario. There was no mutal agreement between gamers, it was a competitive war of exclusive mascots, and not many people could have the best of both worlds. While a return to this formula is unlikely and does tend to result in more fanboys, the times when your console had something to be proud of (outside of first-parties titles) were definitely the best of days...