Console Exclusives: Are you for or against them & why?

[Shifty Geezer]

Lot's of "if's" in this thread (and lack of evidence supporting them)

Some have posted links to hard data like Metacritic scores. What data have you posted?

I've been enjoying my combo of PC + console for the last two decades now

If all those console games had been available on your PC, you'd probably be a grand or two better off right now (no console purchases and savings on games bought). I can see how disagreeable that'd be and how much more preferable it is to spend more money than one should need to.

First party exclusives tend to perform better and provide a smoother experience than that of multiplatforms, of course if you want you can find outliers in both cases.

You say without any data supporting that. What is the mean average framerate and screen tear percent and input lag on Sony's first parties versus cross platform titles? May want to limit that data to games scoring above a certain threshold.

 

[Clukos]

The one problem in your argument which is where i need evidence is that you assume that the current industry would exist in the same exact way without first party studios, or without exclusives or consoles. Where is the data indicating that? It's a nonsensical hypothesis. And that is the premise of your whole argument, that the industry would be better off without first party devs or platforms offering exclusive content.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Why does it need to exist in the exact same way? Surely its self evident that even without first party exclusive games, games of superb quality will be made and sold and bought on whatever platforms run them? In the years preceding the popular consoles, platforms like the 8 and 16 bit computers had a thriving games industry. Commodore and Atari didn't invest in first-party titles, yet their machines, along with the PC, experienced incredible diversity and quality in titles, often cross-platform. The software developers were competing with each other and their own artistic integrity to produce games of quality in whatever genre. In fact the 8 and 16 bit eras highlight how frustrating exclusivity can be because the cost of hardware was so significant, you could only own one machine.

What do you imagine the gaming market to be like if platform exclusive software hadn't existed and neither Sony nor MS had their own studios, simply being content to let others make the games and just selling the hardware and license fees?

 

[psorcerer]

Hardware that can play games is needed, but that needn't be discrete, incompatible boxes.

Yes, as I've already said. One console - is the ultimate goal. But what is the point to reiterate on something we agree on?

there's no hardware differentiator

There is. Each current gaming console is different from another. Just because they DO have different hardware.
Maybe for people like you it's not that different, but from technical standpoint they DO have a lot of differences and are impossible to program for in the same way.
What you are saying right now is akin to "all PCs are the same, they hav CPU, GPU, memory". From the standpoint of writing quality, low latency gaming software all PCs are different.
Each multiplatfrom title makes compromises to make games that look and play similar on multiple platforms. Which in turn means that be these games exclusive they would be better written and had more technical excellence.

All of the above is true only if your goal is to have cutting age tech in games, if your goal is to have any games at the cost of performance, clearly there in nothing bad with unification.
You can sacrifice 80% of performance and have game engine that gives you the same result on any platform.

 

[psorcerer]

And, again, the reason games were platform exclusive was the cost of porting due to highly disparate architectures.

Nonsense. The install base of competitors was too small.
Yes, the PS2 is the ultimate example of "exclusives are good" strategy.
Therefore we can conclude that exclusives are good. And continue from there.
"Exclusives are good, so proves PS2 era" is a fact. And your "exclusives were good, because..." is not a fact but your ideological speculation.

 

[Clukos]

I imagine a bunch of Ubisofts that would make almost every franchise have annual releases, why make games every 3 years when you can make more money by releasing them every year? The third party market is less competitive (less != not, i am not saying it's not competitive at all) than first party and this is why we get incremental iterations of the same product each year.

 

[psorcerer]

Shifty has made the following argument: no exclusive content per platform, all games are cross platform. You buy platform specifically based on the hardware, OS, and features you like.

"I live in a fantasy world" - is an invalid argument.

P.S. it's akin to: "Japanese cusine is bad", because if we were living in a fantasy world where everybody was vegetarian...

 

[Globalisateur]

...
If all those console games had been available on your PC, you'd probably be a grand or two better off right now (no console purchases and savings on games bought). I can see how disagreeable that'd be and how much more preferable it is to spend more money than one should need to.
...

You never know. I know one person who have spend roughly 2 grands on one free* PC game during a 2 months period. Sad but true.

My point is, consoles, PC and others platforms are co-dependent and exist now because of a co-development (synergistic evolution). A world with only PCs exactly as they are now doesn't exist because it wouldn't be a stable configuration. Publishers develop those console exclusives because those are consoles (no piracy etc.), they wouldn't develop the same games on PC (as they are now).

Destiny still only sold on consoles? GTA5 being sold on PC 19 months after the consoles? Remember Half Life 2 and how it got stolen, where is Half Life 3 now?

Shifty, is your keyboard smoking?

 

[pjbliverpool]

You never know. I know one person who have spend roughly 2 grands on one free* PC game during a 2 months period. Sad but true.

My point is, consoles, PC and others platforms are co-dependent and exist now because of a co-development (synergistic evolution). A world with only PCs exactly as they are now doesn't exist because it wouldn't be a stable configuration. Publishers develop those console exclusives because those are consoles (no piracy etc.), they wouldn't develop the same games on PC (as they are now).

If that were true then we wouldn't get PC versions of any games. But we do.

Destiny still only sold on consoles?

I'm not sure I see your point. The vast majority of multi platform games are now released on PC's as well as consoles. This is an increasing trend. For every Destiny, there is a Street Fighter 5 or an Ori. Cherry picking one game doesn't really support your argument.

GTA5 being sold on PC 19 months after the consoles?

But still getting a PC release and being the best version of them all.

Remember Half Life 2 and how it got stolen, where is Half Life 3 now?

Is that a serious argument?

 

[dobwal]

If that were true then we wouldn't get PC versions of any games.

Pubs extract billions of dollars from the current market which warrants the level of investment we are seeing in game development today. Remove console gaming and the dynamics drastically change.

The cost of porting gta 5 to PC is a lot cheaper than the cost thats required to build GTA 5 as a PC exclusive.

GTA 5 cost ~250 million dollars to develop and market. That cost is shared by all the platforms involved. The PC alone in its current state wouldn't support a game like GTA at that level of investment. The PC market would have to be relatively as large as the PC/console market we have now with piracy kept in check to warrant spending that type of money to develop and market a game that isn't sub based or freeware that dependent on microtransactions.

Console serve another positive role in relation to PCs. They serve as the performance baseline for modern graphics. And without them, the baseline would be the millions of PCs that aren't meant for high level gaming at all.

The Chinese and Koreans love their PCs and PC gaming is dominant form of gaming in those regions, but what Chinese or Koreans franchises are we all drooling over because of their graphics? Probably none and thats because the average PCs in those regions aren't supporting the level of performance offered by current consoles.

 

[Sonic]

I don't think the quantity of quality games we have today would exist if not for 1st party exclusives. There would surely be quality games and a nice size market for them, but not on the scale we have today. If it had somehow played out differently and there were no 1st party exclusives on any platform or there was just say, the PC, I don't see how that would have grown the gaming market to the size it is today. It's romantic to imagine that all these 3rd parties would be competing with each other quality wise, but at what cost and size to the market? If it were just the PC market to expand then for a long time in the past it would have been prohibitively expensive for consumer and developer to expand the market from low end to high end due to the sheer gap and ever expanding hardware power.

Nintendo is a company that absolutely proves 1st party exclusivity mattered in prior generations. Selling and making money from your own games that create demand on your specific platform over those of your competitors makes sense.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

If it had somehow played out differently and there were no 1st party exclusives on any platform or there was just say, the PC, I don't see how that would have grown the gaming market to the size it is today. It's romantic to imagine that all these 3rd parties would be competing with each other quality wise, but at what cost and size to the market?

Why not? As I said, we already had that state in the 8 and 16 bit eras. What have the first parties done to really push the big budget games? Has Sony or MS invested in anything as large as FF or GTA? Seems to me the biggest investors are the third parties, notably because they have the larger market to target and can recoup more.

Just looked this up. Loathe to use top lists as they focus on outliers, and better would be a median investment in games or somesuch. However, here's a list of expensive games dominated by third party, cross-platform titles. And PC games. Even if not particularly accurate, we can tell from genre type and scope which games have costed the most, by and large, and the first parties aren't particularly more extravagant than the third parties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop

If it were just the PC market to expand then for a long time in the past it would have been prohibitively expensive for consumer and developer to expand the market from low end to high end due to the sheer gap and ever expanding hardware power.

That assumes the PC market stayed as it was. Again, the argument isn't a world without consoles, but a world without discrete, isolated platforms. I agree that if there was nothing to game on except $1000 PCs since 1990, the gaming landscape would be different, but that's a discussion about what consoles have done for gaming, and not what console exclusives bring to gaming.

Nintendo is a company that absolutely proves 1st party exclusivity mattered in prior generations. Selling and making money from your own games that create demand on your specific platform over those of your competitors makes sense.

Actually, N. have said they don't like spending too much on games which is why they like limited hardware. I suppose limited hardware means third parties can't spend way more than N. on software and overshadow N. visuals. I think Nintendo shows first parties not pushing the boat out and other developers being the ones to invest most heavily in software.

 

[Clukos]

So Shifty, how do you think publishers like Ubisoft or EA would justify AAA single player projects on PC when even right now, with the market as it is they face 3 main issues:

• Gray area sites selling keys at a lower price point than MSRP
• Piracy, not even arguable, current gen consoles have 0% piracy
• Because consoles do not have grey area sites selling keys day 1 full price sales are guaranteed, meaning higher overall revenue for said game

Having PC as a main platform without consoles would pretty much mean the death of single player focused games such as Uncharted, TLOU, Sunset Overdrive, Quantum Break, Mario, Zelda, Bloodborne, Dark Souls etc. Or at least we'd see many more multiplayer focused games instead of such games. Do you think PC is filled with such games just because PC consumers want to play them? Is it a coincidence that this model ( focus on F2P, in-game transactions, multiplayer games) is the one that solves the three problems i stated above?

• You can't buy a F2P game because it's free, so you don't have to worry about grey area sellers
• You can't pirate F2P for the same reason
• You don't care about day 1 sales, all you need to do is create more cosmetics for your userbase, more concurrent users = more potential income

What did CDPR say just a few months ago?

"If the consoles are not involved there is no Witcher 3 as it is," answers Marcin Iwinski, definitively. "We can lay it out that simply. We just cannot afford it, because consoles allow us to go higher in terms of the possible or achievable sales; have a higher budget for the game, and invest it all into developing this huge, gigantic world.

"Developing only for the PC: yes, probably we could get more [in terms of graphics] as there would be nothing else - they would be so focused, like if we would develop only on Xbox One or PlayStation 4. But then we cannot afford such a game."
"If the consoles are not involved there is no Witcher 3 as it is," answers Marcin Iwinski, definitively. "We can lay it out that simply. We just cannot afford it, because consoles allow us to go higher in terms of the possible or achievable sales; have a higher budget for the game, and invest it all into developing this huge, gigantic world.

And it's not only the number of sales, which is still important, but the price point as well. I am willing to bet that CDPR made more money from the console market than the PC one, because there you'd have to count grey market sales, piracy and simply lower price sales. The Witcher 3 right now costs about 28$ in G2A (grey market), 32$ on GMG (official steam key distributor), 59.99$ on Ps4 and 59.99$ on X1. If we shifted in a PC only market would that allow for games such as The Witcher 3?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Each multiplatfrom title makes compromises to make games that look and play similar on multiple platforms. Which in turn means that be these games exclusive they would be better written and had more technical excellence.

There's a whole other thread somewhere for saying how much superior first parties are to third.

You can sacrifice 80% of performance and have game engine that gives you the same result on any platform.

80%?! You're saying every cross platform game is using one fifth of the console/PC's potential, and platform exclusives are 5x better? That's Gears of War and Ryse on UE were only tapping 20% of the hardware's capabilities?!

Nonsense. The install base of competitors was too small.

'Too small' comes down to a matter of cost. There was another ~30-40% more gamers out there not on PS2. If porting was cheap, you could potentially increase sales by some 30-40% for little investment. However, rewriting a PS2 engine to an XB engine and GC engine wasn't worth it because they were so different. If XB and GC were built the same as PS2, ports would have been cheaper. In contrast, today XB1 represents some 30% of the market (PC+PS4, illustrative figures). Possibly much less. But as porting is cheap because of hardware similarities, games are still targeting it. If 'too small' were a reason not to port, why would any dev waste their time on a 15 million install base when there's 20+ million* (current-gen console equivalent) PCs and 25 millions PS4s to target? XB1 is an extra 30% income for little outlay. If MS hadn't used eSRAM, they'd probably get even more ports because the cost would be reduced.

I know in your world where every dev writes GPU only code and hardware is used with 100% efficiency, they all shy away from the dirty notion of inefficient, economics-driven development, but in real terms as businesses trying to make money, the choices are driven by how much it costs to make/port a game with whatever level of efficiency enables that cost effectively. The world is full of dirty developers who actually use and rely on the CPU. Bastards! We see that in the PS2 era where a game got a PS2 release at first, and then a later port to other machines after the title had been tested and money recouped. If the install base was 'too small' they'd have never bothered. And some of these ports were lousy because they didn't want to invest in refactoring the engine. Even when the hardware was very different, exclusivity was mostly a matter of economics and not choice to be exclusive for the particulars of a machine.

* I don't know what the number is! Just know about 80 million Steam accounts.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

So Shifty, how do you think publishers like Ubisoft or EA would justify AAA single player projects on PC when even right now, with the market as it is they face 3 main issues:

What has this got to do with the discussion? They won't justify AAA single player projects on PC, nor on an exclusive console either (unless paid by console owner). Third party AAA projects are cross platform to make more money.

 

[Clukos]

Like i said previously, if you have many platforms, you have exclusives, in the world we live in at least. So your whole argument, in a plausible form, is that consoles basically need to stop existing. To put it more simply:

• Consoles in the market = Exclusives and first party studios (exist to create value for the platform)
• No consoles in the market = PC becomes the main platform to play games on
• Aforementioned problems faced by publishers in the PC platform = Reduction or extinction of AAA projects such as GTA V, The Witcher 3, Uncharted, TLOU etc.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

So your whole argument, in a plausible form, is that consoles basically need to stop existing.

No. I don't disagree with what you're saying, but your extending the argument somewhat. Given the question 'are exclusives good?', the answer' we're stuck with them' isn't valid. I think we've basically come to consensus where, in an idealised utopia, not having to spend n hundred dollars to gain access to a particular subset of the games library is a Good Thing, just like we aren't brand limited to certain publisher's movies or music or books. In the world we live in, console exclusives are inevitable as the console companies compete, even if those exclusives are a Bad Thing for gamers' pockets. If you agree to that, then you can answer my opening question with "yes, if those platform exclusive console games were available on PC then I'd be better off."

The upside of console exclusives, mostly discussed earlier in this thread, is that you get better hardware utilisation and possibly more creative investment, although that's less important with the opening of the markets to indies and no need for a publisher.

That said, I think a lot of the more recent, rather rambling and indistinct, arguments have been pretty nonsensical, suggesting PC exclusives aren't up to snuff, third party devs aren't as good as first party, third party doesn't invest as heavily as first, etc. All of which has been disproven to my satisfaction with the supplied data. I don't know if that should be spun out into another thread or just dropped.

 

[Nesh]

The whole argument of multiple hardware having the same games is mood and unrealistic. Its like ignoring reality. It can't happen.
Sony and MS want royalties fro the developers that make games for their platform. Therefore they need to increase as much as possible their market share. This is why they want exclusive games. They want to differentiate and they dont want to give money to competitors

Then lets see the scenario where they produce the hardware but play the same disk. How do they get any royalties? They will need to profit from the hardware. Profit margins for hardware are extremely low. Unless they go for an underpowered hardware they wont get any profits. And in that case, less will be interested for hardware that cant provide a better gaming experience. They wouldnt even be getting satisfactory PC ports. Arkham Knight, Withcer 3, Far Cry 4, Assasin's Creed? Who would have bothered for such a console that wont be able to play such games? It is one of the reasons why the Wii U doesnt get many games that come on PC, PS4 and XB1.

Now lets say someone else produces the hardware while Sony or MS make games for others. They will loose royalties from games others would have produced on their platform. Their own games would be competing with others and they would be the only source of revenue.

On top of that they will be giving royalties to that other company that will own the platform which if its going to be just one, that means a monopoly which is not good (Why not just let only Sony or only MS make hardware if you think this is a good idea?). Now if that company profits, there will be others that would like to enter, and they will. By the time that happens we will be back to what we already have now. Multiple companies producing their own hardware and getting royalties.

The other suggestion is to not have consoles at all and just have PCs.

It can't happen. The suggestion of no exclusives and all games being multi platform is silly

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Then lets see the scenario where they produce the hardware but play the same disk.

No-one said they have to play the same disc. You should just have access to the same games. Have exactly what we have now, say, only without MS and Sony making first party titles. You'll still have a healthy console industry, a healthy games industry, lots of investment in quality titles, and no limited title availability. This is exactly how it was in the 8 and 16 bit home computer market and it worked.

Looking forwards, we may well have a future where Windows is ubiquitous. You'll buy a game and run it on your PC and tablet and set-top box. How annoying will it be to have several devices all capable of playing the next Uncharted but being required to buy a PS5 to play it? And beyond that, a future where everything is streamed. How frustrating will it be to have Steam/Windows Gaming/Google Play/Amazon JoyGarden and every game on it available to every device you could ever use, just by logging in, yet have to buy a $500 box to play a couple of Sony or Nintendo or MS exclusives not made available on these ubiquitous platforms?

The games industry hasn't always been about platform exclusives, and won't always be either.

 

[Clukos]

Publishers and producers don't care about what is convenient for the consumer, but what is profitable. If your scenario isn't as profitable as what we have now it won't happen. Money is the main reason we don't see as many AAA games on PC exclusively. Or games built for spec like 5960x and two TX in Sli. Would that be awesome? Yes! Is it possible at this moment? Nah.