I’m pretty sure exclusives hark back from the days of SNES and Genesis, and probably before that, so this may not be entirely accurate. This old argument that “Sony started it all” to imply that Sony is “evil” may not be based on a realistic appraisal of the history of this videogame industry.
I mean yeah, SNES and Genesis had exclusives but they weren't usually done the way they are now in terms of how the deals got laid out. Actually, if you want to trace this type of practice back to anyone, it should probably be Nintendo with the NES. They basically locked 3P companies into exclusivity contracts in order to make games on the NES at all, it's one of the biggest reasons Sega and (less so) NEC had such a tough time courting 3P devs in Japan during the '80s, and even into the early '90s.
There was an anti-trust case Nintendo faced in America in either 1990 or 1991 which they lost, and they had to give rebates to all NES purchasers of a certain amount. That case also declared some of their business practices as monopolistic. You can look back and see how companies like Konami had to make entire spinoff divisions in order to circumvent Nintendo's annual release limit per publisher, or companies like Namco who had to make spinoffs in order to develop and publish games on the MegaDrive.
I don't think there's ever been a platform holder since who's been as strict WRT 3P exclusives as Nintendo was during the '80s, so it's definitely a little shortsighted if anyone's saying Sony started this type of stuff, or imply they're evil for engaging in it. It's just business. But some folks aren't as aware of the type of deals Sony leveraged in the '90s which were reminiscent of the kind of stuff we're seeing them do today. For example, locking the Saturn out of Tomb Raider 2 (Core Design actually made the first TR with Saturn in mind and were never considering a PlayStation version until Eidos forced them to do so), or preventing Code Veronica from being called Resident Evil 3 because of pre-existing contracts with Sony (Mikami referenced this recently in an interview).
So yeah, they aren't evil incarnate, but they aren't saints, either. But the same can be said for virtually every major platform holder. I'd say one of the only ones it probably wouldn't apply to was SNK, but they were kind of going for a very different business model even for their time.
Well, I'm not saying Sony is evil. It might even go back to Atari. But the big $hats started with Sony IIRC. They certainly didn't start with MS. Xbox was only a twinkle in Bill's eye when Sony was passing $hats to 3rd parties to squash Sega. It's business. There are no virtuous corporations. That's not their purpose. Apple, MS, Sony, Google, Amazon etc... just corporations trying to maximize profits for their shareholders.
Well, to be perfectly fair, Sega kind of squashed themselves xD. I could go on for pages about Sega's horrible business decisions in the mid-'90s but suffice to say they hurt themselves a lot more than Sony hurt them. Let's not forget that Sony entering the market also screwed Nintendo over a lot, too; they lost Square, Enix, Capcom (pretty much), Konami (pretty much), and a lot of other high-profile devs. Their "Dream Team" was a bit of a joke (although some of them did make awesome games like Acclaim with Iggy's Wrecking Balls. Love that game), etc.
Yet all that aside, Nintendo still weathered the storm. Sega's mistake was they thought they could outdo Sony by going head-to-head, even though Sony were arguably at their peak (as a fully healthy corporation) during that era, and had way more cash than Sega. Nintendo did the smart thing and focused on setting themselves apart with 4-player multiplayer gaming, and Pokemon hit at the right time, becoming a phenomenon.
Even though arcades were starting to lose popularity I still think Sega could've done a lot more integrating their arcade efforts with Saturn to more fully differentiate themselves from Sony, rather than just chasing after Sony playing catch-up. They didn't, though, because their internal politics were truly, truly awful. Practically zero corporate synergy between the branches, that's why they couldn't organize their efforts more neatly. And it really is a shame, because between a lot of their console output plus the awesome arcade games they released during the '90s, the software was
clearly there.
But, Sega spread themselves too thin, so they couldn't put as much marketing behind certain games as they could. Then they kept making other mistakes like cancelling the Genesis early, releasing the 32X (it really should've never been released), publishing too many games (in 1995 they published over 150 games) and, IMO, investing too much into Gameworks when that money probably would've been better spent on Saturn software development or Dreamcast DVD-drive funds.
So yeah, Sony "squashed" Sega but it was more like Sega finishing off the job Sega were already doing to themselves, and you can't so much blame Sony for that as you can Sega. I wish things played out differently, though, I wish we still had Sega as a platform holder.
). If every game is on every consoles, what the point of différents consoles... Especially when devs don't have the time to customize games for the strenght of each consoles.
