I’m wondering, with the new price announced, how much this will effect 3rd party exclusives. Publishers who are in talks with sony for exclusives have to be sitting up and saying “Woah woah woah, you are cutting out a big chunk of the market with your pricing.”
I wonder if Sony’s bribe-- I mean buy price for exclusives has raised to compensate? As much as people like Dave Long think that pricing won’t effect console sales, it will have an impact. For instance, I normally buy all consoles but the price as announced is a price I will not pay for a game machine, so they’ve lost me as a buyer at least until a major price drop. And I never make the mistake of assuming I’m unique. So I know there are others out there who are in the same position.
On top of that, the pricing aimed against the amount of 360s that will be in the marketplace come early next year, is going to make it very expensive for Sony to manage exclusives that aren’t first party. Adding to that, if MS were to drop the 360’s price around the same time, we’re talking about 360 sales accelerating while the PS3 is still in short supply (and I sure hope no one is kidding themselves in to thinking that the PS3 will be easy to get in the first 3-4 months it’s out).
I can’t imagine that Sony would be willing to pay for the amount of sales lost on other platforms to secure an exclusive.
So will this potentially be the death of exclusives for all but close sony ties? Will Sony lose staunch long time supporters like Konami? Even a company that size needs to sit up and take notice in light of this situation.
Well, we already know GTA4 won’t be exclusive. The Metal Gear Solid games have been making it to the XBox eventually, so that doesn’t bode well for Sony keeping MGS4 exclusive forever, though for the fans who need it RIGHT NOW that might move a few consoles. Why anyone gets so excited about a MGS game is beyond me, but that’s outside this discussion.
Yeah, Sony can pay out the nose to get third-party exclusives, but it seems like “exclusive” really means “exclusive for a few months,” and I get the sense that Sony’s financial situation is going to make it increasingly difficult to offer competitive incentives to developers, while Microsoft has shown it’s willing to pay whatever it takes to become number 1.
Of course, if third-party exclusives go the way of the dodo, then Microsoft and Sony (Nintendo is excluded here, since their hardware probably isn’t going to support the same third-party stuff) will have to rely more on the strength of their first-party stuff to move systems. I think Sony’s got a bit of an edge there, but only a little one, and Microsoft seems hell-bent on catching up. I understand they acquired Lionhead recently, for example.
In general, I don’t think third-party exclusives make much economic sense from the developers’ perspective: given the rising costs of development, they’re not going to want to limit their potential market by sticking to just one console; they’ll want to leverage a title as much as possible. So I think Sony et al will really have to sweeten the deal to persuade the big-name developers to support only their console, even for a limited time.
Where Sony may still have the advantage is among Japanese developers and gamers: it sounds like MS is still really dropping the ball when it comes to courting the Japanese; and Sony has both the home-field and market-leader advantages over there. The question then becomes: how big of a chunk can the Wii take out of PS3? Will they even be courting the same types of gamers? The Wii sounds like it’s going after the Everyman Gamer; with its price, the PS3 will pretty much have to go after the Connoisseur.
That’s a good question. If Sony loses some ground in the US to Microsoft (and I think they probably will), and loses some ground in Japan to Nintendo (and I think they probably will), the cumulative effect could be pretty serious for them. We could conceivably end up with three consoles dividing the market fairly evenly between them this generation. That would be a bad situation for Sony, whose strength (despite what their marketing people would have you believe) lies in their domination of the market and the large and varied game library that it affords them. How many people bought a PS2 because it’s such a slick piece of technology? Now, how many people bought the PS2 because it has so many great games?
Forced to market themselves on the strength of the hardware alone, I don’t think Sony would be any more appealing than Microsoft. And their machine costs $200 more.
I think Sony’s business plan for this generation is extremely ill-considered. It would have been a lot smarter for them to take a step back from the graphics race, design a more conservative console that approaches the 360’s horsepower but which doesn’t even try to outdo it (basically the analogue of the PS2, compared to the original Xbox), and lose the Blue-Ray player. They could have priced the thing at $249, and they probably would have crushed Microsoft this Christmas, even with the mediocre game lineup they have at this E3. People would buy into that price point based on the strength of the brand alone. At a $600 price point, I think a lot of people are going to be more cautious. They’ll want to see the big game library on store shelves before they lay out that kind of cash. That’s the catch-22: if Sony can’t get the ball rolling on the user base, then there’s no guarantee that they can get the developer support they need to build that library.
FF13 and MGS are nice exclusives, but Sony needs a lot more than that, going forward. The PS2 didn’t get to be the juggernaut that it is merely because it had a few key exclusives. It got where it is by having a shit-ton of great games. And a competitive price.
Why do so many of these kinds of threads start with the words “as much as people like Dave Long think?”
I think that, with rising development costs and the challenge of porting between what are becoming increasingly disparate game systems, we’ll see more third-party exclusives, not less.
Think about it. More platform spreading means more overhead, which also means more copies of your games in the bargain bin after a year. Does anyone really want that?
Instead, they can tailor a game for a specific console, make it sing with that hardware and the services available on that platform, and only have the risk of a single pressing to worry about.
The console manufacturers might win because they would really no longer have to pay out for console exclusivity for a good number of titles. It might natually shake out one way or the other.
Sega is a decent example of this kind of thinking; their development is all over the place in the past gen.
With rising development costs, the only way to break even is to sell as many copies as possible – which means not putting all your eggs in one basket.
Think about it. More platform spreading means more overhead, which also means more copies of your games in the bargain bin after a year. Does anyone really want that?
Games end up in the bargain bin regardless of if they are exclusives or not, so I’m not sure what you are getting at here. The overhead of putting your version on all platforms is signficantly less than the gain from selling on multiple platforms.
Instead, they can tailor a game for a specific console, make it sing with that hardware and the services available on that platform, and only have the risk of a single pressing to worry about.
Why would they do that when the marketplace has proven than you can make a sloppy multi-platform port and still sell copies on each system?
It’s a calculated risk: does the added cost of developing for another platform pay off in extra sales? My guess is it’s much cheaper to port a game - since you can reuse art assets et al - than to write a new one; and the more platforms you release your title on, the more opportunities you have to make a sale. The tradeoff is that the cross-platform games tend to be hampered by the lowest-common-denominator factor and thus are less technically impressive than the best system-exclusive titles.
That said, in this generation, you saw a lot of PS2/Xbox titles which ignored the Gamecube, even though I think there are roughly the same number of GCs as Xboxes on the market. And, of course, most console titles don’t get ported to the PC, despite the low barrier to entry and the widespread availability of PCs. So I think it’s about more than market share and platform size; other issues do come under consideration, like where your target audience is.
Think about it. More platform spreading means more overhead, which also means more copies of your games in the bargain bin after a year. Does anyone really want that?
Like Charles, I’m not sure what your point is, as everybody winds up in the bargain bin eventually. Why does being a cross-platform release mean you’ll end up with more (or a higher percentage of) unsold copies?
Sega is a decent example of this kind of thinking; their development is all over the place in the past gen.
True, but I’m not sure they did themselves many favors. I think they released more titles on the Xbox than the PS2, and the former has abysmal market share in Japan. Way to shoot themselves in the foot like that. I also think games like JSRF would’ve been a better fit on the PS2 than Xbox.
Really, cross-platform development boils down to two main questions, IMHO: is it more profitable to release on multiple consoles than on just one; and does it impair game design and development to support multiple systems?
The First one did not make it to the Cube, MGS:Twin Snakes was a gamecube exlusive version of the story from Metal Gear Solid 1 using the MGS2/3 Engine.
No way does Wii get a MGS4 port- it just flat out doesn’t have the horsepower. Maybe they’ll get a different sort of MGS game, but I’ll eat my hat if MGS4 makes it to Wii.
There’s more going on in MGS4 than drawing pixels, and even if there wasn’t, it doesn’t seem that wii supports the pixel shading being employed by Konami. I mean, christ, Red Steel looks like a Half Life TC. Bad textures even for 480p. There’s an argument for putting a lot of power behind a few pixels, but Nintendo isn’t even doing that. Barely an upgrade over the original Xbox. Mario looks nice, but it probably helps that most of the screen is a starfield. It’s a shame Nintendo has decided the next gen of gameplay has to be tied to last gens graphics…
Japanese developers won’t focus much on the 360 given the abysmal sales there and the power gap between Wii & PS3 will be too great for too many ports on that end as well. We might be seeing a few however now that Sony added motion sensors.
