I don't really care all that much. I even think the whole platform-exclusives-are-necesary-for-pushing-the-hardware argument is kind of silly considering you have multi platform games like GTAV and Tomb Raider running circles around most exlcusives in terms of technical achievements. As for the whole focus testing thing. I'd argue that there wasn't a single big exclusive game with the kind of bite and balls GTA 5, Dragon's Dogma or the Souls games had.
Lol, the souls games started with Demon's Souls; an exclusive PS3 game
Dragon's Dogma also isn't that impressive interms of scope. It certainly was in terms of game design and overall gameplay experience. However in terms of agregate critic reviews, Dragon's Dogma falls a bit behind many of the heavyweight exclusive titles. It also does do all that much technically (much of the game looks like ass, aside from its great art direction and particle effects which save it).
Tomb Raider also isn't at all impressive on a technical level, since it does little more than your typical uncharted game, and by all accounts looks worse by a reasonable margin (that's not to say its a bad looking game mind).
I'll certainly give you GTA 5 and games like Skyrim, Fallout, RDR etc. Since these games are the biggest and best multiplatform games, often very technically accomplished and with production values that rival or even surpass the console exclusive games in many cases. These are however few and far between among multiplatform games, because they cost significantly more to make (2-4 year dev cycles) and thus require a large enough installed base in order to recoup their massively inflated production costs.
I think there is a point to be made about platform exclusive games being necessary to push the HW, since looking at games like Gears, Halo, Uncharted, Killzone, GOWIII, these are all games developed on 18-24 month dev cycles at a fraction of the cost of the biggest multiplatform games (certainly true in the case of GTA5). Yet they are typically lauded as some the best if not the best looking games on their respective platforms, with production values that rival and more often than not surpass the bigdogs multiplats. This is only possible in because the devs need only focus on a single platform. This greater development efficiency means that we can have more of these games per generation, than the biggest multiplatform titles:
GTA - 2x
Fallout - 2x
RDR - 1x
Elder Scrolls - 1x
Gears - 4x
Halo - 4x (5 if you include Halo Wars)
Uncharted - 3x
Killzone - 2x
GOW - 2x
Essentially the point I'm making is that, if every game was multiplatform, and as big and costly as GTA 5, in order to maintain such a high standard of polish and visual fidelity in order to match what a first party studio might produce, then the industry would crash because gamers would have significantly less games available to play on their newly bought boxes.
Its no wonder then that exclusives get some much love from the gamer community, since exclusive devs tend to more consistently and more frequently push out games reaching that gold standard in visual, production and often gameplay quality.
