Podcast: Play in new window | Download
With cross-console play in talks between Xbox One/PC/Playstation 4, exclusivity becomes a thing of the past and we tackle it in our focused segment Boss Battle. Where did it all started and where is it going?
On this podcast, Level Select has us falling into nostalgia as Nintendo continues their Select deals as we get ready for Quantum Break and the pain of Dark Souls 3, the Grinnnnd finds Wyldkard climbing over his Fire Emblem walls while Kuma builds piles of tank corpses in World of Tanks. Also, we introduce our special guest TheMcPhailure!!!
We hope you enjoy.
Roster –
Kuma
Wyldkard
DAsilvanator
TheMcPhailure
Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/TheGrandGeekGathering
Twitter: @TheGrandGeekG
Email us GrandGeekGathering@gmail.com
Twitch.tv twitch.tv/thegrandgeekgathering/
First off, Kudos on briefly mentioning “Enslaved: Odyssey To The West.” I really like that game.
If I knew you guys were going to talk about game exclusivity, I would have loved to have been on the episode.
This should have just been a blog post, but whatever…
Exclusive games and it’s impact to gamers have been around since the beginning when Atari and Magnavox were duking it out. That’s when they would compete on how their version of Pacman was better on X console compared to X console. For the most part though, nobody really cared. Looking slightly different wasn’t an issue, so exclusivity wasn’t as much of a factor in what you owned.
The NES vs the Sega Master System is when exclusivity made a huge difference. Simply put, if a game is on the NES, there’s a 98% chance it’s not on the SMS, and vice versa. This rule also kinda applies for the SNES vs Genesis era, where a good chunk of the the game libraries are exclusive to themselves. If you only had one console, you really missed out on a whole bunch of games. Nintendo and Sega had huge 1st party developers, and their games determined which console you would buy.
The difference with the SNES / Genesis generation compared to NES / SMS is that there were 3rd party publishers that actually did want multi-console ports this time around. However, what ended up happening is that each console would have different versions of the same game, in look and how they played. Mortal Kombat famously had blood for the Genesis, while the SNES did not. The TMNT fighting game had completely different game mechanics for their console. Castlevania was a different version on the SNES compared to the Genesis. A game looking the same on both platforms was not as common an occurrence back then as you would think. Gamers argued with each other about what they owned, and this was truly the first generation of the console wars, and that’s because of the exclusivity issue.
When the Playstation arrived, that’s when things dramatically changed. Almost every relevant 3rd party publisher pretty much abandoned the Sega Saturn and N64, and suddenly Sony’s console had a mass amount of exclusive games by default, plus they didn’t even need to completely rely on their 1st party developers to keep things afloat. That’s the start of gamers flocking in mass towards Playstation as the only console they would need, and not many gamers and companies had to worry about multi-ports. People forget that the first Tomb Raider game came out on the Sega Saturn first before Playstation got it’s port, but nobody cared and treated it like a Sony exclusive.
It wasn’t any better in the next generation between the Dreamcast, Gamecube, and PS2. While DC and GC had some 3rd party titles, you pretty much bought them for the 1st party Sega and Nintendo games respectively. It was like the SNES vs Genesis (vs TurboGrafx-16) generation. With XBox entering the fray, they surprisingly survived with the exclusive games they were able to get, with Halo and the better version of Splinter Cell being the primary reasons to own Microsoft’s console.
Once the 360 and PS3 generation entered, game publishers realized that the cost of making games with exponentially better graphics was higher than they could afford. They realized that they will have to survive by focusing on making their games multi-platforms. Microsoft and Sony saw this coming and that’s when they became aggressive in spending money on 3rd party exclusive titles for their own consoles. They basically needed to be the “new” Sega and Nintendo, except they wanted 3rd parties to choose sides. By this point, 3rd party games actually kept both consoles successful, so the reliance to exclusive 1st party games became more a nuisance than a true selling point for gamers. That’s when people started buying a console like an appliance and for it’s ecosystem, than for actual specific games themselves. The Wii’s library of exclusive games further proves the point that exclusive games was not as important as it used to be in the SNES vs Genesis era. It wasn’t “all about the games” anymore.
With this current generation, we are looking at a combination of the Atari vs Magnavox era of game library parity, but with the console war mentality of the SNES and Genesis era that is somehow still as strong as ever. If not stronger. With exclusive games becoming more and more rare, the further merging of the PC’s gaming library joining the consoles, and now with more talks about cross-platform plays, I think that day when one box can play all the games is coming sooner than later.