The logic of platform exclusivity remains undefeated | Opinion

While a great many things have changed in the games business in the past few decades, certain basic principles remain unyielding. One of those is the simple idea that games sell hardware – that while there may be a small, devoted audience who’ll buy a new gaming device out of brand loyalty or curiosity, the vast majority of consumers buy games hardware because they need it for specific games that they want to play.

That, for many years, was the driving logic behind console exclusive software. Platform holders invested in expensive, high-quality games for their systems not just in the hope of direct commercial success, but in order to create unique selling points for their consoles.

The commercial logic of exclusives was always a trade-off. The potential sales of the game would be higher if it were multi-platform, but the benefits of attracting new users to the platform outweighed the costs of restricting the audience in this way. This idea of creating games not just to achieve direct commercial success, but to serve as powerful promotional tools for their host platform could also change the budget calculus, justifying hefty investment in titles with incredibly broad scope and high production values.

That logic remained sound for decades – and for Nintendo, at least, it hasn’t changed one iota right up to the present day. Nintendo creates games to sell its hardware, and builds hardware around the needs of its games. Its entire business is structured around exclusivity and that feedback loop between its exclusive games and its hardware.

For Sony and Microsoft, however, things seem to have become a bit more complicated in recent years. Microsoft has more or less painted itself into a corner on exclusivity; it spent so much money buying Activision Blizzard that it couldn’t possibly hope to show a return on that investment without letting that division keep publishing cross-platform. Since that means most of its biggest titles are multiplatform games, the company decided to go the whole hog and start putting previously Xbox-exclusive titles on PlayStation as well. Commercially, it’s working for the software – Microsoft is now a huge publisher on the PlayStation platform – but all the advantages of exclusivity have been stripped from the ailing Xbox platform.

Sony’s decisions in this regard have been a little more tentative and cautious, but still leaning in the direction of doing away with outright exclusivity. The acquisition of Bungie was a bit of a pivot point, since it brought with it the very much cross-platform Destiny 2, and Sony’s leadership at the time clearly thought that the bright, shiny live service future they anticipated for the company would need to follow that multiplatform model.

The PlayStation catalogue didn’t go multiplatform overnight, but we saw the walls starting to crumble; major PlayStation exclusives started getting PC ports a year or two after launch, and curiously, a Lego Horizon title – based on one of Sony’s biggest exclusive franchises – launched on Switch.

Sony has spent the past couple of years slowly backing away from the strategic thinking of that era, especially in regard to live service games, so it was probably inevitable that its dalliance with multiplatform releases would also come to an end – just another step in the dismantling of the difficult legacy of Jim Ryan’s last few years at the division’s helm. Jason Schreier reported for Bloomberg this week that that is coming to pass, with the company scrapping plans to launch major first-party games like Ghost of Yotei on PC.

To many consumers, this will not be welcome news. Whatever the benefits of exclusivity may be to platform holders – and it looks like Sony is firmly coming back around to that stance – it is largely a nuisance for consumers. Needing to own multiple expensive devices to play the full range of big games each year is a major burden, and it’s one that no other medium places on its consumers. For all that music services may compete with one another, there’s no risk that the next major pop album will only appear on Apple Music, with Spotify following years later or not at all. The closest equivalent is the need to juggle multiple streaming services to watch a decent range of movies and TV, but none of those demand that you buy expensive hardware just for their service.

However frustrating exclusivity may be for consumers, though, the business case for platform holders looks hard to ignore. Sony’s initial thinking when it started pushing out PC ports of its major titles seems to have been partially about extending the business into new markets – notably in territories where console sales are very weak – while also encouraging people to engage with Sony franchises and potentially “swim upstream” to become PS5 consumers down the line.

Neither of those approaches seems to have worked. The company’s PC ports reportedly haven’t sold very well – for example, according to Newzoo data, just 6% God of War Ragnarök’s lifetime players played on PC – and while there’s no external data that can tell us about conversions of PC players to PS5 players, the company itself also seems to think that hasn’t happened. Without success in either of those arenas, this experiment simply appears to have failed.

You could of course argue that the problem is that it was a half-assed effort to begin with. Launching big PS5 games two years late on PC was never going to set the world on fire. There might have been more success if Sony had committed to launching PC versions of its major titles at launch – but of course, then there would have been no incentive at all for consumers to move across to PS5. Moreover, there’s a not unreasonable interpretation of Microsoft’s Xbox woes which says that they really began when the company decided Xbox games would all launch simultaneously on PC – arguably the first of several rug-pulls that knocked the Xbox off its feet.

The bad old days of paid exclusivity for third-party games really ought to stay in the past

With Sony coming back to a traditional view of exclusivity and Nintendo never having stepped away from that, Microsoft will no doubt be thinking long and hard about how to give Xbox a software USP. Their position is more tricky; console exclusivity on Xbox effectively means sacrificing a very large addressable audience for a much smaller one, and the company would need to be willing to accept poor commercial performance from some key titles in the name of rebuilding the appeal of the Xbox platform. Yesterday’s announcement that the next Xbox will play PC games suggests the company remains focused on cross-platform scale; where there’s room in that strategy to limit some titles to the living-room experience remains to be seen.

For Sony and Nintendo, at least, first-party exclusivity seems set to be a core pillar of their business for years to come. Consumers can hope, at least, that this will largely stay confined to first-party titles – the bad old days of paid exclusivity for third-party games really ought to stay in the past.

As long as it does remain the domain of major first-party titles, there is at least a silver lining. The drive to make exclusive titles into real showcases of their systems has, in the past, created some of the most spectacular and high-quality games of any era. The nuisance factor of widespread exclusivity is unavoidable, but if it at least supports a pipeline of incredible games, many consumers will find a way to make their peace with it.