The Changing Face of Exclusivity
Are console-specific franchises on their way out?
You might remember long ago when Nintendo and Sega were jostling for the limelight on ‘90s television ads. They traded lighthearted barbs — ‘Genesis does what Nintendo-n’t!’ as they vied for their respective shares of the video-game market. Flagship franchises like Mario and Sonic were inseparable from the hardware their creators also made. Thus, the decision to buy a SNES or a Genesis/Mega Drive came down to which of those two era-defining mascots had your loyalty. Decades on, the aggressors in this console war have changed and, slowly, so have the tactics.
Beyond: Two Platforms
Earlier this year, French narrative specialists Quantic Dream published a handful of their older games that were initially published by Sony as exclusives for the PlayStation 3 and 4. Likewise, Death Stranding will make its way to PC by mid-July, and Horizon: Zero Dawn, another well-received PS-exclusive, will be there by August. Thatgamecompany’s Journey arrived on Steam fairly recently, too. Quantic Dream are self-publishing, Kojima Productions have a deal with 505, and Guerrilla have the help of PlayStation Mobile. It is a fascinating turn of events, and particularly interesting from a strategy perspective. Sony’s publishing deal with Kojima’s nascent independent studio five years ago represented another boon for the company in terms of shifting more hardware: the auteur’s games are treated like generational events by some, and it bolstered Sony’s already fearsome lineup of single-player experiences. It seems like traditional logic would apply: keeping titles on one system might make players choose that system, and amassing a long list of killer apps could see Xbox or PC loyalists make the switch. Instead, Sony’s arrangement with Kojima Productions gave them less than a year of platform exclusivity before Death Stranding saw wider release.
It seems this is increasingly becoming a widespread strategy. Developers and publishers seem less and less interested on where and how you play their game, as long as you play it. Microsoft has ditched an awkward relationship with its PC player base in favour of one where its games are sold on Steam and other online storefronts, seamlessly integrating with its Xbox platform as opposed to being at total odds with it. EA seems to have finally acknowledged some of the shortcomings of Origin and has returned to selling titles on Steam too (though they invariably still require logging into Origin anyway). Bethesda saw a brief player count bump when they made Fallout 76 available on Valve’s monolithic storefront, too. From the PC perspective, all of these examples seem like reversals of the defiant protectionist strategies they employed years earlier. Consensus wisdom seems that, whether or not you have to pay Valve a cut to sell your games on Steam, more options for players and greater availability will more than make up for that cost.
This might explain the arrival of PlayStation-associated franchises on home computers, particularly given that some of those games debuting on the PC are a generation old at this point. Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls have both came and went on the PS3, and it seems that whatever sales they were still getting a decade later might have finally slowed. It seems prudent, then, to reintroduce those titles to players who’ve never owned a PlayStation at cut-price, especially if the porting work can be done cheaply and easily. Reinvigorating the sales lifespan of an older game where the development work is already done might be a no brainer. It especially works for the kinds of games Quantic Dream puts out: I daresay nobody is buying a PlayStation just to play Detroit: Become Human. But, as someone who was intrigued by the game on release but not enough to buy a whole new console to play it, a $30 PC port is welcome, and fair price-wise. Additionally, you’re unlikely to annoy PlayStation loyalists by letting the exclusivity lapse after a few years: they have long since played and loved these games, and getting those titles earlier than Xbox and PC players remains attraction enough. Like Microsoft’s re-envisioning of how Xbox and PC interact and intersect, Sony view the PC market as one they can carefully take advantage of in a way that does not diminish their core PlayStation brand. It goes without saying that the broader strategy of exclusivity remains: none of these Quantic Dream titles are slated to come to Xbox. Instead, Sony have recognised the PC as a platform that represents a less obvious direct competitor, and thus one they can market to.
The Holdout
Far-removed from this strategic shift, as is tradition, stand Nintendo. It is beyond unlikely that you’ll ever see a Mario game on either of the flagship consoles. Even though they broke with their exclusivity tradition with a recent spate of mobile games, none represented full, ‘proper’ Mario experiences, the sole preserve of Nintendo’s series of home consoles and handhelds. This is understandable: Nintendo’s core franchises are inseparable from their hardware, much moreso than those on PlayStation and Xbox perhaps due to age. It’s not like the strategy doesn’t work, either: I’m one of probably a decent number of people who bought a Switch specifically to play first-party releases like Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey. However, those relying solely on the Switch have at least been bolstered by the greater third-party attention the console is receiving than the Wii U.
The consoles that Nintendo’s top-tier franchises release on also complicate things. Games that release simultaneously on Xbox on PlayStation benefit from the systems being so similar in terms of how the player interacts with them: the differences between an Xbox controller and a DualShock 4 is largely a matter of preference, with face buttons, triggers and analogue sticks being roughly consistent between the two. Power-wise, the two consoles split hairs when it comes to graphical performance. The fact is Nintendo’s mid-generation console releases rarely perform on par with what comes next from the other two, yet they often represent a significant step-up from whatever came before, which is why Switch owners are seeing countless ports of early and mid-generation PS4 and Xbox One releases. Couple that with the ‘gimmicks’ of Nintendo’s console design — Switch portability, Wii motion controls, the inexplicable design decisions of the Wii U — and it’s clear that most of Nintendo’s big hitters would not suit straight ports to either more powerful or more ‘traditional’ hardware anyway. Ironically, despite seeing marketing phrases like ‘Only on PlayStation’, the Big N are usually the ones making games that could only exist on their hardware.
Unlike other publishers, Nintendo is also notoriously patient when it comes to sales. Big, first-party releases rarely go on sale, irrespective of their age. Both Sony and Microsoft are taking advantage of subscription services to offer free or heavily discounted games to players, especially in situations where the title is a year or two old. Nintendo remain steadfast in their pricing model: Breath of the Wild will still cost you about $60 today, the same as it did roughly three years ago. I daresay it will cost the same a year from now, too. After all, Breath of the Wild is still one of the best ways to spend sixty bucks. With flagship titles being consistent sellers whatever the price, coupled with the unique hardware quirks Nintendo employs, there is little incentive for them to give Microsoft, Sony or anyone else a taste.
Not Dead Yet
These trends are interesting ones to be sure: Microsoft’s rethink of Xbox and PC symbiosis came to fruition at a similar point to Sony thinking a little freer when it came to older exclusives that might have reached a sales trough in the PlayStation ecosystem. Timed exclusivity looks like the bridge strategy here: the day-one experience for, say, Death Stranding, could only be had on PlayStation 4, and that still presumably has some meaning for the player-base. It is also worth remembering, though, that these choices look like little more than Sony testing the waters. You get the impression that certain lines will never be crossed: Halo would never see a PlayStation release in any capacity, just as an Uncharted game will never get a listing on the Microsoft Store. The release of Quantic Dream’s recent catalogue and Hideo Kojima’s latest project aren’t exactly Sony’s heaviest hitters, and the biggest franchises becoming more readily accessible might be a step too far. Then again, Halo making a return to PC seemed like a pipe dream once.
More than anything else, it has to be good news for players that games are easier to access and play, with less emphasis on their platform allegiances. Maybe certain franchises will always maintain a Nintendo-like exclusivity sacredness, and that’s fine, but being drip-fed a few of those quirkier titles a year or two later at a cut price is a welcome shift in strategy. I recently played and enjoyed Detroit: Become Human, and there was something surreal about seeing Sony Interactive Entertainment splash-screens on my PC. I was transported back a couple of years to a time when I was seeing coverage of the game and never expected to play it — at least, not any time soon. A reversal of that has to be good news: I got to play an interesting game, and Sony got thirty of my dollars. Everybody wins, right?
