As Sony And Xbox Dilute Exclusivity, Let’s Be Grateful That Nintendo Exists

It’s been a great week if you’re part of the anti-exclusivity movement in gaming. Great games for all—even if with a delay between its original release and going multiplatform—feels like a positive sentiment to wish for in this industry, and with just how much of that industry now being in Microsoft’s hands, I think we’re all breathing a sigh of relief that the company’s strategy going forward is to have ‘every screen be an Xbox’ (via Inverse) instead of hoarding IPs for its own consoles. Its hardware may be struggling, but make no mistake: ownership of Activision-Blizzard gives Microsoft huge leverage about how this industry’s going to look in the future.

Almost at the same time as Microsoft confirmed that four of its exclusives will be coming to PS5 and Nintendo Switch the other day, Sony made a big statement about its own multiplatform strategy, with PlayStation president Hiroki Totoki saying that he wants the company to be bringing PS5 exclusives to PC sooner (via VGC) than before. Obviously no comment was made on reciprocating Xbox’s plan to bring exclusive games to PS5, but you can be sure that’ll be coming up in discussions at Sony HQ at some point. I can easily envision a future where there’s a ‘pecking order’ for PlayStation exclusives coming to other platforms, with PC first, then Switch, then Xbox last in line.

Breaking Down Barriers

The walls of console exclusivity are—if not exactly collapsing around us—being dismantled brick by brick, and that’s definitely a preferable option to the alternative of Microsoft buying out every major games publisher under the sun in order to force gamers to its platforms.

But there is a flipside to this, and that’s the question of what this does to console identity. What will picking which console to buy even mean in, say, five years’ time? Will it just be a case of preferring one controller over another? The privilege of getting ‘exclusive’ games a bit earlier than on the rival platform? Maybe secondary features like backwards compatibility will grow to play a bigger role in swaying customers, and honestly that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

But remember just how utterly different consoles used to be from each other? Buying a Mega Drive or an SNES would basically give you an entirely different games library and experience. The PS2, GameCube, and OG Xbox era was probably the greatest ever in terms of high-quality platform-exclusive diversity, and much of this quality came from the fact that each console had tons of original first-party titles, vastly varied in internal hardware, and was truly committed to establishing a unique identity.

Games like Shadow of the Colossus on PS2 represent the great platform-exclusive variety we used to see on consoles.

Even as recently as the PS3 and Xbox 360 generation, the former had a nigh-on alien internal architecture that infamously made it a nightmare for cross-platform games, but meant that some of its first-party games, like God of War 3 and The Last of Us, were technical marvels way ahead of their time. Once upon a time, exclusivity looked different; it meant that console makers would either commit resources to making games in-house, or nurture strong relationships with developers for extended cooperation or eventual buyouts based on a history of working together (like how Sony did with Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games).

Source

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With Microsoft likely to announce its first wave of PS5 games next week, what Xbox game do you most want to see on PS5?

Microsoft kind of bastardised the above vision for exclusivity in recent years with its ‘hey, this gaming company is big and successful, let’s buy it’ approach. There’s a big difference between a company working closely with a developer then integrating that developer into the company, and buying out full-on corporations in order to hoover up all the IP they own (like Microsoft did with Zenimax and Activision-Blizzard).

The actual technical differences between Sony and Microsoft consoles have already been converging for quite some time. In terms of GPU and CPU, the PS5 and Xbox Series X are pretty much the same thing, running on the same generation of AMD Zen 2 architecture. This is entirely logical in terms of making it nice and easy for multiplatform and indie games to run on the respective consoles (well, not always), but an inevitable side-effect is that both consoles end up with much the same bunch of games—great for accessibility, but not so great for identity, and in turn, for meaningful consumer choice when it comes to which one you buy. For now, Sony’s exclusive roster is holding the line, but that could very well change in the future.

Here’s To Nintendo

Today, Nintendo really is the only console maker that remains committed to exclusivity, with the vast majority of its first-party games being in-house, entirely original, decades-old IPs having been a defining part of the company’s identity since Day One. Yes, there have been a few targeted deals along the way, like Nintendo getting the Bayonetta license from Sega, or buying out Xeno-series developer Monolith Soft back in 2007, but by and large they’ve remained as focused on their core IP and identity to build their brand as they were 20, 30 years ago.

In context of the understandable fear that Microsoft’s recent acquisitions were moving the industry towards a monopoly, it’s definitely preferable that we’re seeing an opening-up of exclusivity barriers rather than everyone holing up with all their games in their console forts. But at a time when ‘exclusivity’ has become defined by big-money buyouts and mass-scale IP acquisitions that suddenly mean games like The Elder Scrolls,Diablo, and Call of Duty are ‘Microsoft’ games, even though Microsoft had nothing to do with building up these IPs, it’s comforting that we still have Nintendo sticking to their guns.

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