Is exclusivity good for the game industry?

Making agreements about an exclusive availability of some games on a particular marketplace becomes a kind of trend nowadays. Such a situation is dictated by the business part of the industry — with no support from the community and even with quite aggressive resistance.

I would like to make an objective review of these processes. How do they affect the growth of the game industry? Which further actions of publishers can help us to make a successful business and allow many astonishing games to be added to the global game culture?

From GOG to Epic

The phenomenon of exclusivity in the game industry is not new at all. When we talk about console exclusives, there are almost no objections. The community of gamers agrees with “God of War” only on the PlayStation consoles and “Forza Horizon” only on Xbox (and Windows 10). Still, when something similar happens in the dimension of PC games, players suddenly become almost outraged.

First, “Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales” was released exclusively for the GOG store. The community decided to ignore the game and make it appear on Steam as well. Only after that step of the publisher, Thronebreaker reached financial success. That was just a start of the “exclusivity issue”.

The real fuss started with exclusive presence of “Metro: Exodus” on the Epic Store. The game was promised for Steam and some people pre-ordered it there. The news about this exclusivity was highly disappointing — regardless of the justified expectations of pre-orders.

Even bigger anger burst out with the exclusivity of Borderlands 3. Previous entries in this series are available on Steam, so players can’t understand why they need to bother with a new launcher and a new store to continue their adventures. Borderland games got lots of (fake) negative reviews — this was a way for the community to protest against the exclusivity decision of the game publishers.

In terms of the industry

Sometimes it’s wise for business people to try and see the activity of their companies from the position of their customers. How do gamers see the situation with exclusivity?

Most end-users don’t need multiple stores on their devices. Some people may have questions about game prices on the PS Store in comparison to the same games on Steam, but the idea of adding an alternative store for PlayStation seems to be too weird.

For a long time, Steam from Valve was that one game store for personal computers. In some aspects it’s imperfect, but still, it’s familiar and therefore convenient. GOG doesn’t have such an audience to make the exclusivity reasonable for a new game. Epic Store doesn’t offer anything great and significantly different to switch to it, having a huge game library on Steam.

With this in mind, let’s check out all the controversial aspects of the game exclusivity — in terms of the whole video game industry.

• The monopoly of a game store doesn’t really limit the choice for gamers. The market competition becomes internal, whirling inside of this particular place. At the same time, the monopoly of a game store allows its owners to dictate rules to game publishers. For example, it’s a well-known fact that Valve takes quite a big cut of the revenue. Also, theoretically, the algorithms of a store may be unfair for certain games, hiding them from the users’ eyes.
• Publishers are not the final link in the scheme of delivering games to the customers. Earlier, such companies needed real-world stores to sell discs. Now, they need digital stores and should take this additional mediation into account. It’s nice to have one place where all the gamers gather to get something to play. At the same time, it’s a pity to make yourself dependent on this business partner. Huge publishers release their own exclusive stores (Uplay for Ubisoft games, Origin for EA game), but they can’t compete with “gaming supermarkets”, where customers have a much bigger choice.
• It’s convenient for gamers to have all their games in one library, to check only one list of discounts and new titles. Also, add here information about play history, achievements, and virtual items — and you will understand why so many people are so upset with the necessity to install and use another launcher to play a game they want to play. Of course, gamers can understand the position of publishers and potential benefits from the market competition. But in most cases, these arguments are not substantial enough — especially when the same gamers feel being victims of aggressive market fights.

Exclusiveness, based on Innovations

The biggest issue with many game exclusives is the lack of innovation. Those games are the same on any store. And those stores aren’t really different from each other — another design and some interesting small features don’t make a significant difference.

I see no problems in exclusiveness if it’s motivated by exclusive innovative features of this particular store. For example, our Post Scriptum games are made on the base of Tangle, so they need a game platform to support the same technology of distributive registry — such as the upcoming Paracosm platform. Thus, an innovative feature of the platform totally explains the game exclusiveness, leaving no space for dissatisfaction and pushing the industry development.

Please, check out my article “Do gamers need DRT?”, where I discuss such type of innovations.

At the end of the day, the game industry exists for gamers, and market fights are absolutely unreasonable if the business doesn’t try to give gamers something better, more innovative. Also, those fights are absolutely unnecessary if the reason for them is the intention to bring something innovative to the industry. In such cases, innovations speak for themselves, and companies need only inform the community about new amazing things, to make reasons for the exclusivity obvious.