The Game Plan 04.20.07: The Death of Exclusives, Part One
Posted by James McGee on 04.20.2007
As third-party exclusives become a thing of the past, what are the console companies doing to convince gamers their system is number one?
I have committed a heinous oversight that must be corrected before this column can continue. I need to give a big shout-out to good friend and loyal reader Ryan Holliday for cluing me into the fact that 411mania.com was hiring in the first place. He's part of the reason I'm even writing this column…so direct all hate mail to him. Thanks for the tip-off, buddy (and for a great idea for a future column).
When I was a kid, there were two video-game powerhouses: Nintendo and Sega. Unless you had really cool parents who would buy you both systems, you had to make a difficult choice between the two. Aside from a few exceptions (most of them published by Acclaim, interestingly enough), it was rare to see a game appear on both the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis. Each system had a very different catalog of games, with very distinct, recognizable characters, and so it wasn't uncommon for heated discussions to break out in the lunch room as to who would win in a fight between Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog. Granted, these discussions usually degenerated into bouts of spirited name-calling, but hey, I said "heated" not "insightful." The war between Nintendo and Sega was the beginning of brand-loyalty in the video game world, and with so many console-exclusive titles, it all came down to which system you thought had the best games.
Today, there is a three-way battle raging in the industry. Nintendo is still kicking, but Sega has bowed out of the race, only to be replaced by two multi-media giants: Microsoft and Sony. Brand loyalty is just as fierce as ever, but the landscape of the battlefield has slowly been changing. Whereas seeing a game appear on multiple consoles was rare in my younger days, it's now commonplace. Since the days of the Nintendo 64 and original Sony Playstation, more and more third-party developers* have chosen to release their titles on multiple platforms. The reason for this is primarily money. As the cost of creating games rises, developers have to find ways to make more money, and the simplest way is making their games available to the largest number of people possible. While this tends to anger some loyal fans (something I hope to talk about in a future column), third-parties can't be blamed in the least for wanting to make a profit.
During the last generation of consoles, this wasn't such a big issue. While you could find many games on all three systems, there were still plenty of exclusive titles on the Playstation 2, Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo Gamecube to make any one of them a viable contender. However, announcements have been coming fast and furious during the last few months that titles originally thought to be exclusives for the Playstation 3 will also be released on the Xbox 360. This includes such high-profile franchises as Devil May Cry, Mercenaries, Virtua Fighter, and possibly even Final Fantasy—all of which were once major reasons to choose a Sony machine. In a rare bit of good news for Sony, Bioshock, one of this year's "it" games and formerly thought to be making an appearance only on PC and Xbox 360 was also just announced for the PS3. With the death of exclusivity looming on the horizon, what are the Big Three doing to give themselves the edge? Over the next few weeks, I plan on exploring that very issue. I am James McGee, and here's The Game Plan.
Game consoles aren't just for gaming anymore, and so I want to start off by examining the elements of this equation that have little or nothing to do with games. First off is the ability to play movies on the machine, something that gave the PS2 an edge in the last generation. Though it's hard to believe now, people weren't sure if DVDs would catch on when they were first introduced. Still, Sony took a chance, and some believe that the PS2 even served as a "Trojan Horse" for the format by introducing it to people who would not have otherwise given it a second thought. With stand-alone DVD players so expensive at the time, it made a lot of sense to buy a machine you could watch movies on and play games with. The Xbox incorporated the same technology, but was a little late to the game, and didn't make watching movies as user-friendly as the PS2, since you had to buy a separate "Movie Playback Kit" for the feature to even work. The Nintendo Gamecube chose to go with those cute little mini-discs, showing that it was all about gaming. I really respect that approach, and I don't think that choosing DVDs was the key to Sony's success, but I certainly don't think it hurt.
Movie technology has advanced right alongside gaming technology, so we now have two new, high-definition media formats to choose from. The PS3 has chosen to support Blu-ray discs, while the Xbox 360 can play HD DVDs through a peripheral (sold separately, of course). Just as they did with the Gamecube, Nintendo has ignored this issue altogether, as the Wii still doesn't even allow for standard DVD playback. So, which system has the edge? Of course, that will largely depend on which of the two formats ends up being more popular, but initially, I'd have to go with Sony. Blu-Ray has been outselling HD DVD so far. Plus, even at the hefty price of $600, the PS3 still comes in roughly $400 below most stand-alone Blu-Ray players, once again giving it the same advantage it had during the DVD era. Microsoft has helped out by again forcing consumers to buy a $100 add-on to be able to play the unproven HD DVD format. Blu-Ray is also a smart move for the PS3 because it will have an actual effect on gaming—the BR discs have more storage space than standard DVDs, and so games can be bigger and better. The 360 doesn't have the ability to play HD DVD games, only movies, and I think keeping gaming first is the real key to this whole issue (but more on that in the coming weeks).
While it might seem like Nintendo dropped the ball with this one, I don't think it will make much difference. Standard DVD players are so inexpensive at this point that having another device to play them is virtually irrelevant. The same thing will happen with hi-def formats, so while this is something that may give one company the advantage in the short term, it will ultimately amount to very little as time goes on. In the long run, unless one format becomes totally obsolete, putting their support behind one type of media or another just isn't going to have that big of an impact on whether people chose a particular console.
Next week, I will continue to look at how Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are compensating for the lack of third-party exclusives with online features. Xbox Live used to be the only game in town, but can the Wii and PS3 become contenders in their own right? Tune in to find out. Feedback is always welcome, so feel free to drop me a line in the meantime.
* For those not down with the lingo, a "first-party" developer would be a company that makes both games and the console to play them on. So, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo are all first-party developers. "Third-party" companies are independent developers who can and do make games for all of the first-party systems. Think of them as arms dealers without an allegiance to any particular side in the console war, providing ammunition to the highest bidder.
