Console Exclusives: Significance and Impact *spinoff*

[Shifty Geezer]

Seems to me that exclusives are a garnish, and 3rd party games are the meat and potatoes.

I agree with that, and the people you're arguing with probably do as well. By 'no games' they likely mean distinguishing games. You can get meat and potatoes anywhere.

When people try to tell me that they'll only eat at 1 Michelin star restaurants only, that just screams a level of elitism to me and not much else. And I come away reading these list wars as exactly that.

This is very different though. We;re not comparing art-house cinema fanatics to mainstream movie goers. It's the difference between two burger joints offering lovely fast food, only one has a bit more range on the menu - that's where the list wars comes in, comparing the differences. Both offer chocolate, bana and strawberry mikshakes, but one also offers mint and vanilla flavours, which attracts 5% of potential clients to be loyal for the occasions they fancy somethign different.

"Only exclusives can do this, only exclusives can do that", I look at the top 10 played games today and I'm just shaking my head. The only thing exclusives do is limit another player base from playing.

They also secure funding for esoteric games. Dreams being exclusive is what allowed it to start and what's keeping it alive, no doubt. Same with The Last Guardian. But of course indie can do that too such as Minecraft, but it does help with the possibility of AAA creations, like ZBotW. Games that get lots of incubation time to flesh out the platform menu.

 

[iroboto]

I agree with that, and the people you're arguing with probably do as well. By 'no games' they likely mean distinguishing games. You can get meat and potatoes anywhere.

lol no, sometimes I don't think they do, they really just mean it to be, "no distinguishing games for me". Xbox One exclusives are most certainly distinguished.

This is very different though. We;re not comparing art-house cinema fanatics to mainstream movie goers. It's the difference between two burger joints offering lovely fast food, only one has a bit more range on the menu - that's where the list wars comes in, comparing the differences. Both offer chocolate, bana and strawberry mikshakes, but one also offers mint and vanilla flavours, which attracts 5% of potential clients to be loyal for the occasions they fancy somethign different.

Yes, i don't disagree that this is a thing. Emphasis on the importance of exclusives greatly outweighs much of the discussion recently. The reason for PS4's lead has clearly been cheaper and better hardware. And this started a critical population size that drove friends to follow early adopters. Going full circle to the original thread, before the spawn, exclusives are now the greatest and only point that now matters, which seems to me, as a convenience point, now that PS4 is no longer holding the crown for performance.

They also secure funding for esoteric games. Dreams being exclusive is what allowed it to start and what's keeping it alive, no doubt. Same with The Last Guardian. But of course indie can do that too such as Minecraft, but it does help with the possibility of AAA creations, like ZBotW. Games that get lots of incubation time to flesh out the platform menu.

Yes this is true, but the end result is what matters though, since MS has been producing quite a few exclusives, but only a handful to critically positive reviews.

How the games are funded: how much, or how little; how long or for how short the game has been in development has no direct correlation on whether the title is a hit success or not.
It may certainly have an effect on graphics, and technical systems though.
But PUBG shows how quickly a mod can be thrown together, supported and explode in a relatively small amount of time.

 

[Globalisateur]

...

Here's the thing for me, and I'm not trying to troll or anything. But this argument of no games keeps coming back by the very same people who, honestly, are likely to have more hours played in Destiny than all the exclusives they've played on PS4. Probably in the magnitude of 300-1000 hours worth of Destiny.

...

So all I'm saying is, how does one really rank what is better, the games that get the most hours played or games or some other metric?
And should it matter how large and diverse that library is, if folks are unloading 3000+ hours into a single title?

...

People that spend that much time in a game, and doing very similar things like grinding, seriously need help.

Playing short, unforgettable and diverse experiences like The Last Guardian, Bloodborne or Zelda BOTW would help them.

 

[iroboto]

People that spend that much time in a game, and doing very similar things like grinding, seriously need help.

Playing short, unforgettable and diverse experiences like The Last Guardian, Bloodborne or Zelda BOTW would help them.

I try not to judge, some people know what they like and will keep doing it over and over again.

I've had my in and out of love with Destiny myself. They managed to turn it around after they released The Taken King expansion.
I don't deny I personally like to look for those short, unforgettable and diverse experiences, I keep kickstarting them on PC. But they these unforgettable experiences are seldom if ever played more than once, actually making them quite forgettable.

My most memorable moments are games I clocked way too many hours in, achieving really difficult things, like the time I went to Nationals for Counter Strike. Dominated folks on ladder for Red Alert. Was the second druid on our server to complete the AQ set. Meeting some raid folks from other countries in person, because we played Wow and starcraft together.

 

[mrcorbo]

1. If every time you post in a Vendor A-related thread the post is negative about Vendor A or is about why Vendor B is better maybe your contributions to Vendor A-related threads aren't very valuable.
2. If every time you post in a Vendor A-related thread the post is positive about Vendor A or is about why Vendor A is better than Vendor B maybe your contributions to Vendor A-related threads aren't very valuable.

I'll take posters who manifest their biases as an over-enthusiasm for their preferred vendor over those who have to obsessively run down their competition, though and by a wide margin.

 

[mpg1]

It depends on what types of games you like. I tend not to give a shit as much about the story when it comes to games. It's more about how good the gameplay is...how much action there is..how repayable it is ...how rewarding the "progression system" is if there is one.

I used to rush through the campaigns of Halo and COD just so I could get on to multiplayer...which I sunk many hours into.

So the exclusives Sony tend to have which tend to be single player 3rd person action/adventure games or Japanese are not necessarily appealing to me.

 

[Nesh]

Xbox has lots of exclusives, especially if you say console exclusive, which makes sense since MS wants to help out it's store/windows 10 by putting those games there as well. Either way buyers of those games are supporting MS. I personally have Halo 5, Gear 4, Halo MCC, Gears Ultimate edition, lotsa Halo/Gears goodness. Not everything is just the last 6 months. Although MS did have Halo Wars 2 this year it just got zero attention. I should probably try that one I enjoyed the first, the middling reviews put me off but I also know better than to trust reviews...Cuphead and some other stuff is coming, as well as timed exclusive of PUBG which is the biggest game around right now, and Path of Exile which my brother has been big into on PC for years.

Ok this is a little cherry picking, but the NPD best selling games of the past 12 months (as of July) doesn't include any exclusives except for a Nintendo 1st party (which is the only game in town on their hardware).

• Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare

• Battlefield 1

• NBA 2K17

• Madden NFL 17

• Grand Theft Auto V

• Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands

• FIFA 17

• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

• Final Fantasy XV

• For Honor

Read more at http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2017/08/17/july-2017-npd/#156OXW6FaLcie9ZD.99

I guess if you include "Japanesey" games PS will always have a numbers edge in exclusives list wars though. If you like those you probably wont want Xbox.

Sure I WISH there was some awesome Xbox One X exclusive to debut with the system, but ah well. It's nice to want things, as Shane Bettenhausen used to say on 1up yours podcast.

Anyways as to explaining my vote in the OP, I preorderd 2 Scorpio editions. I guess just to be safe and maybe flip 1. But, I already knew this is going to be a very hard product to flip because the price will have to be 700+ just to make decent profit. So I'm definitely out on that. But, I'm really planning on actually buying the non-scorpio edition, I dont like the tacked on green lettering. So these preorders will be canceled most likely. They're just for safety's sake.

I can get 15% discount so the box will be effectively ~425 for me, then I plan to craiglist my Xbox One S for maybe 120-150 and count that towards the X1X. So the effective price of the X1X will be quite manageable. I still have my 360 I guess for posterity's sake, but I see very little reason to keep an Xbox One around if you have an Xbox One X.

Anyways I'm really looking forward to it. Something like Battlefront 1 just proves the Xbox One, while it can be a very nice and powerful box, is power deficient. That game is blurry enough to ruin the effect on X1. I'm so looking forward to cranking up Battlefront 2 looking it's best on X1X. I wasn't (so far) able to swing a TV upgrade from 55 to 65" like I wanted, but at least I've got a nominal 4K HDR set of the same size now. So I'm ready, I guess you could say.

Top 10's include all platform sales. Exclusives sell on one platform only. So Top 10 is not exactly indicative
In addition the top 10 ignore the fact that even if an exclusive is not there. it's sales performance can be highly significant.
Also a game like a Call of Duty can sell to everybody, but what dictated someone's purchase of a specific console to play COD can include exclusive A and for another exclusive B of the same platform. You need system sellers and all XBOX traditional system selling franchises came a long time ago and have worn out.

And also you ve got sales performance like this that show impact: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...ystation-exclusive-to-top-uk-charts-this-year

edit: The previous era MS managed to sell me an 360 because of Gears of War which was new and a big flagship system selling title.

This gen? Even the massively powerful and well designed, well thought X cannot convince me and even my friend who is looking for a console to upgrade is leaning towards a PS4 for GoW, Spiderman, Uncharted, Horizon, Death Stranding etc. And he is a 360 owner

 

[iroboto]

Top 10's include all platform sales. Exclusives sell on one platform only. So Top 10 is not exactly indicative
In addition the top 10 ignore the fact that even if an exclusive is not there. it's sales performance can be highly significant.
Also a game like a Call of Duty can sell to everybody, but what dictated someone's purchase of a specific console to play COD can include exclusive A and for another exclusive B of the same platform. You need system sellers and all XBOX traditional system selling franchises came a long time ago and have worn out.

This is debatable.
Many arena shooters have come and gone and died, and Halo 5 still has a healthy player base.
Many TPS games have come and gone and died, and Gears of War 4 still has a healthy player base.
Many racers have come and gone and died, and Forza Horizon 3 still has a healthy player base.

Neither game set the world on fire, but all three of the games still have a strong population.

source: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/most-played/games/xbox?target=games..all

4 1st party games, all in top 25 most played games on Xbox.

 

[djskribbles]

Here's the thing for me, and I'm not trying to troll or anything. But this argument of no games keeps coming back by the very same people who, honestly, are likely to have more hours played in Destiny than all the exclusives they've played on PS4. Probably in the magnitude of 300-1000 hours worth of Destiny.

And for all this talk of how earth shattering PS exclusives are, and how diverse their library is, they can't stop playing Halo 2.0.
Or if they aren't playing Halo 2.0, they're playing GTA 5.

So all I'm saying is, how does one really rank what is better, the games that get the most hours played or games or some other metric?
And should it matter how large and diverse that library is, if folks are unloading 3000+ hours into a single title?

People talk about system sellers: there was only 2 this gen, and it's name was Destiny and GTA V, and they happen to sell on both.
People left PC to play these games because they weren't available, and now that they are, I'm not so sure anymore.

There may be nothing wrong with MS' strategy when it comes to libraries. They are looking to build that 'Destiny', 'GTA' title. If 1 game is all people want to play, just keep supporting it, there's nothing wrong with that strategy. But people keep trying to tell me that I should be in love with all these single player experiences, while they are playing Destiny with their buddies online.

tldr; wouldn't it be a flawed argument about how important exclusives are if the most played games on PS4 so happened to be exactly the same as XBO (the console with no games) ?

Seeing as how I have thousands of hours into Destiny, I feel that this was at least partially aimed at me.

Yes a large majority of my game time was spent on Destiny. But I'm far from your typical gamer. At the same time, I have followed the gaming industry fairly closely in the past decade so I like to think that I know the market well enough to give an informed opinion.

Shifty pretty much explained things so I don't need to add much else. But I would also like to point out that, you say the most hours played on games were in Destiny and GTAV (and I'd also throw CoD into the mix)... Sony just happens to have marketing rights for all 3 of those games (GTAV not so much, but it was revealed at Sony's conference IIRC). Don't underestimate the importance of marketing rights for large third-party games. It's not a huge hardware selling point, but it does help nonetheless.

 

[Rangers]

If you want to play Destiny or GTA5 (or most AAA titles that only run on consoles at 30fps) at 60fps, you won't even need a 1070. A 1060 (or 580) will be enough. It's not only about GPU Tflops, it's mainly about CPU.

And if you want to play the best looking consoles games, then Pro is the console to own with it's exclusives (Horizon, GTS, God of War 4, Uncharted games, TLOU2...).

Halo 5, Forza, are 60 FPS on Xbox One. Many console third party do 60, Battlefield, COD, Battlefront, sports franchises, Titanfall 2 etc. So the CPU can do 60. Additionally you see the multiplayer modes of Uncharted, Killzone, running 45-60 FPS with degraded graphics/resolution in MP. Meaning likely, the tradeoff was GPU not CPU. Considering multiplayer is the more CPU intensive mode.

"Best looking" is subjective (ok well, it's probably like human attractiveness, one part subjective and also one part objective). I think Battlefront 2 is up there with any of those Sony exclusives and it will look best on console on X1X (even better on Win 10 I guess). Uncharted and the various Zombie games look fairly blah to me. Not that they dont definitely look good, I guess it's just diminishing returns all around anymore, that and everything is incremental especially now with iterative consoles, so it's hard to get a "wow" jump, if there is even one to be had. Horizon is definitely among the best graphics ever, at the time I saw it I declared it best graphics anywhere. But it's still into diminishing returns. I was less wowed with Horizon than Gears in 2006 or Killzone in 2008. Also, have you seen Forza 7 at true 4K locked 60 FPS on console? It's pushing like 3-6X more pixel load than any other console racer I know of while still looking fantastic. I think Forza is a console exclusive showcase for X1X that cant just be dismissed.

But I think as always the premise is wrong, and has been for all the decades it's existed. More powerful PC doesn't invalidate the most powerful console because they aren't direct substitutes, many people only play on consoles. Of course whichever side doesn't currently have the most powerful console tends to trot it out though. When PS5 comes out, it's power wont be invalidated because there are more powerful PC's the day it releases.

 

[zed]

Should you not care about exclusives, XBOX is now the best play. Imo this is before Scorpio, as far as I'm concerned the Xbox platform is way ahead of PS, with Scorpio there is no debate.

So you're claiming that a xbox one S plays games better than a ps 4 pro?

 

[BRiT]

So you're claiming that a xbox one S plays games better than a ps 4 pro?

Xbox One X. From wence this thread was derailed.

But I can see how people's opinions about the platform could be better for them even on the Xbox One S. MS allows for crossplay and play anywhere (buy game and play on console or PC) and also BC for the previous generation (X360) and the generation prior to that too (Xbox Original).

 

[MrFox]

This thread is weird as fuck.

I spent an hour looking at this generation's games on metacritics with 80+.

It provides perspective. I recommend it.

 

[BRiT]

@MrFox
Why care about what others think? Go play the games you enjoy yourself on whatever platform you enjoy and let the other fools waste their time arguing instead of gaming.

 

[MrFox]

@MrFox
Why care about what others think? Go play the games you enjoy yourself on whatever platform you enjoy and let the other fools waste their time arguing instead of gaming.

I can't! Someome is wrong on the internet!

 

[BRiT]

I can't! Someome is wrong on the internet!

Fucking Nintendo Fanboys! AMIRITE?

 

[MrFox]

Hey everyone, there a Knack 2 demo that came out today on PSN.

 

[Nesh]

This is debatable.
Many arena shooters have come and gone and died, and Halo 5 still has a healthy player base.
Many TPS games have come and gone and died, and Gears of War 4 still has a healthy player base.
Many racers have come and gone and died, and Forza Horizon 3 still has a healthy player base.

Neither game set the world on fire, but all three of the games still have a strong population.

source: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/most-played/games/xbox?target=games..all

4 1st party games, all in top 25 most played games on Xbox.

But this shows 2 things
1) That exclusives are important for XBOX

2) That these titles no longer set the world on fire as they used to.

Also MS doesnt provide any numbers at all or any comparison with previous generations.

I know vgchartz isnt the most accurate source but it gives an indication where things are going.
Gears 4 has sold less(around half the sales) than any other Gears except Judgement
Halo 5 sold even less than the original Halo on XBOX. It is significantly the lowest selling sequel.
Forza Motorsport 6 sold less than the other Forza Motorsport games in the series.

In all these games going from sequel to sequel on One we see a significant downward trend.

Halo and Gears were two of the most anticipated franchises on the XBOX and were selling systems. People are losing interest and they arent getting new IPs of similar caliber/impact to cover the decreasing interest.

 

[BRiT]

@Nesh and how does this fare for Sony exclusives such as ShadowFall? Or is that too hard to get numbers for since it was a pack-in? How about Gran Turismo? Or has it still not been released yet?

 

[MrFox]

How about Gran Turismo? Or has it still not been released yet?

Spoiler