The third-party console exclusive is back from the dead – but why? What’s changed? And is it something that’s going to last beyond the first couple of years of PS4, Xbox One and Wii U?
The age of the third-party console exclusive all but died with the last generation, with a focus on timed deals and DLC packages taking the place of what had been – for a very long time – the place to find a console’s true gems. But then a strange thing happened this generation: they came back.
The Xbox One bagged Titanfall, Dead Rising 3 and Sunset Overdrive; PS4 brought us Final Fantasy XIV and InFamous: Second Son; the Wii U even chipped in with Bayonetta 2, Lego City Undercover and The Wonderful 101. Not to mention the upcoming console exclusives like Quantum Break, Street Fighter V, Persona 5 and Devil’s Third. There are plenty more, too, and when you think about the returning timed exclusives – say hello, Rise Of The Tomb Raider – there really does appear to have been a resurgence in the culture of console exclusivity.
From a business perspective, exclusives have a certain allure to them early on in a machine’s life-cycle. “Console exclusives are more valuable at the start of a generation,” explained Edward Zhao, business analyst at EEDAR, “since they convince early adopters, often the core audience, to buy in on a platform. If a player’s network of friends become ensconced on one console, it’s much less likely they’ll migrate to a competitor.” It’s straightforward then – and expected – to see single-console third-party releases out in a machine’s first year or so. Dead Rising on Xbox 360 (and the aforementioned third numbered entry), for example, or Ridge Racer V on PS2, Star Wars Arcade on the 32X, Rogue Squadron II on GameCube – the list goes on.
But why do studios decide to go down the exclusive route? Why would a studio choose to intentionally limit how many people can play its game on consoles by shutting out two thirds of the potential audience? We asked Mikael Haveri of consistent Sony collaborators Housemarque why his studio – and others – would choose to do such a thing. “From a studio perspective, there are advantages to being an exclusive,” he said. “For example, a huge marketing push from the platform holder at all major events – meaning your game becomes an ace in the sleeve.”
This increased attention on the game is something that just couldn’t be done without the help of the likes of Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo. And this attention isn’t just something to be focused on the guaranteed sales successes, as Haveri continued: “Not everything can be quantified by the audience. Think Bayonetta 2: it might not have happened without Nintendo stepping in – and, independently from the sales, it’s a siren’s call for hardcore customers (i.e. the ones willing to invest more in a platform). Perception is sometimes as important as the numbers.”
It’s this need to stand out and appeal to certain sections of the gameplaying public that is central to many elements of the exclusivity discussion, and it’s clear that – especially early on in a console’s lifespan – there’s a need for a platform holder to stamp its authority on a particular demographic. But, as Haveri explained to us, it’s not just down to the games: “A sense of identity in the mind of a gamer can consist of a lot of different things – hardware performance, quality of content, scope of additional content, etc. Currently Sony, for example, has gained a lot of goodwill with its ‘4 the gamers’ slogan and then being able to back it up with content catered to gamers.”
But while the battlegrounds of ‘my console is faster than yours’ will always be contested, the apparent death of the exclusive last generation saw one constant fall by the wayside. Why is it back? Some hypothesise it’s related to the death of the mid-level, ‘single-A’ developers and publishers like THQ, meaning there wasn’t much in the way of affordable output that suited exclusives in the PS3/360/Wii generation. As such, they fell by the wayside.
But now we’re in the era of the indie – the big companies are paying attention as they realise that, while an entire platform can’t be built around them, there’s more than enough interest in the smaller games to justify splashing out on exclusives. Have the indies stepped up to fill the single-A vacuum? Ninja Theory’s Dominic Matthews said yes: “The platform holders have opened their doors to independent developers, both small indies and mid-sized teams, who want to develop and publish games themselves.
“I’ve seen a big shift in the approach of platform holders, where they are now doing all they can to help studios publish their own games. Being given the chance to create your game yourself, in your own way, and then to be able to publish it directly onto a new-gen console is a fantastic prospect for lots of developers. This can be done without an exclusivity partnership, but working very closely with a platform holder helps.”
But the big hitters are coming too – and the likes of Street Fighter V are only coming to one console. Even the next Lara Croft adventure, Rise Of The Tomb Raider, won’t be seeing the light of the PS4 until it’s been on the Xbox One for quite a while. While these decisions have confused some, Zhao said he believes it makes absolute sense: “Both have extenuating circumstances which can mitigate the loss of sales on a platform. For Street Fighter V, it’s about how the PS3 was the console of choice for fighting games and how this trend is likely to continue for the PS4. For Rise Of The Tomb Raider, it’s about the potential sales cannibalisation if they competed against Uncharted 4. Both are slated for a 2015 Q4 release. Thus, both Capcom and Square Enix feel like they aren’t going to lose a massive number of sales by going exclusive.”
Haveri agreed these bigger games were things that might confuse those not approaching from a business perspective: “Sometimes business decisions seem weird from an outsiders perspective,” he said. “I’m sure that brand portfolios as legendary as Capcom’s are constantly considered by many interested parties. If only it was as easy as buying an idea to create a hit exclusive… In the end, all franchises that have potential for exclusivity will not come cheap.”
And as Matthews told games™, cost is always a consideration for studios: “The fixed retail price of games has meant that the big publishers have to compete on ever-growing feature lists in their games and not price… Huge development costs mean that the big publishers have to do what they can to hit their targets, and in some cases it makes sense to work directly with a platform partner exclusively to give the game the best chance of success.”
But there’s another side to exclusivity, especially when speaking about indie developers – resources. Volgarr The Viking, while released first on PC, was a console exclusive on Xbox One not because of deals in place with Microsoft, but because the two-person team behind it, Crazy Viking Studios, didn’t have the time or money to make the game for other formats. “As a small indie developer with low resources (literally one programmer and one artist), we can only really afford to develop for one platform at a time,” Taron Millet, of CVS, explained.
“Xbox One was the cheapest because Microsoft offer free dev kits as part of the ID@XBOX program, thus we went with it first.” So this wasn’t a decision motivated by any kind of platform loyalty, or one under any stipulations of keeping Volgarr away from other formats for a fixed period of time, but was instead simply the most economical decision for such a small studio.
Millet clarified the studio’s stance: “If Sony and Nintendo offered free dev kits as well, we probably would have picked based on whichever platform had the most demand instead. We did not sign an exclusivity deal with Microsoft and still plan to release Volgarr on other consoles as time and funds allow.”
So is this the rebirth of the exclusive? Zhao didn’t think so – you can understand why, from a more analytical business point of view: “As we progress further into the generation, each additional exclusive will have less power when it comes to selling a console. It’s likely that exclusivity deals will mostly focus on DLC.” As far as the business side of videogames is concerned, this is a simply a characteristic of the early days of a console, not the rebirth of what was once one of the most exciting elements in gaming.
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