Ben-DutkaIt's no secret that at this point, the first-party software for PlayStation 4 is fairly limited.
And after Uncharted 4: A Thief's End and the Ratchet & Clank re-imagining got pushed to 2016, the holiday season is looking sparse as well.
Speaking during Sony's annual Investor Day Conference, PlayStation president Andrew House admitted that the PS4's first-party lineup is a little thin this year. That's why they'll have to lean on third-party titles for the time being. And he added:
"Rather than seeking for complete exclusives, we have looked to publishers to really try to maximize the use of the feature-set on PlayStation 4 versus the competition. And I think that the use of Share and SharePlay functionality, those have been sort of defining platform features which can be seen not just in first-party content but across the whole range of titles."
That's nice, Andrew, but very few consumers are going to opt for PS4 as opposed to Xbox One because of Share and SharePlay. It's simply not a deal-breaker or deal-maker. Uncharted 4 ? Yep, deal-maker. Exclusive software has always been PlayStation's bread-and-butter and there's a darn good reason.
I mean, it's nice to see Sony admit the lacking right now but let's not hide behind hardware features. No matter how many bells and whistles a game console has today, one fact remains: People still buy them for the games.
Got the marketing deals for BLOPS3 and SWBF though – that should help,a bit
Bloodborne, The Last of Us, DriveClub, and multiplats like Destiny, The Witcher and Star Wars Battlefront.
That's what will sell PS4s this Christmas. If you are in the market for a new console then you can't go wrong.
Sony announce the super secret games at E3 please. MS's amazing line up is literaly: Halo, Forza, Gears, and some old and dead IPs not a lot of people are going to care about. They aren't bringing anything new to the table, and you have to.
Nintendo isn't bringing much either. This E3 will be ruled by the 3rd party companies, and I'm hoping that Capcom and Bethesda bring out the big guns and really show what they have brewing inside of their factories.
MS lineup is a safe bet type of thing, because gamers have been seeing that exact thing for years on that console.
Last edited by maxpontiac on 5/28/2015 11:51:32 AM
People always heavily overrated the importance of exclusives. It's first and foremost an important tool when your product lacks in other departments, as a compensation. It's bloody expensive to make.
And like I've said before, I will not be one tiny bit surprised if Xbone delivers more exclusives than the PS4 over the next 3-4 years. Hate me all you like for saying so, but just you wait and see.
Last edited by Beamboom on 5/28/2015 4:14:57 AM
My Xbone is ready for more exclusive, but seriously I also think that Microsoft will go all out this Gen. Not surprising if they win this year e3, they had good lineup tho…
MS *have* to go all out this gen if they want to stay relevant.
Sony, on the other hand, can scope up profit from day one. And who can blame them for wanting to, as long as they maintain the lead.
They may deliver more exclusives (though I have my doubts) but it's about quality. Give me one Uncharted over 5 average games that no one cares about 3 months after they release.
Nobody overestimates anything, Beamboom. They just use numbers.
If you want to see sales spikes for all game hardware dating back a decade and a half, you might notice that just about all of them occur when either A. a price drop happens, or B. a new exclusive launches.
The PS2 wouldn't have been half the monster it was without exclusives and really, it didn't start rolling until the summer after it first launched. And why? Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec, with the prospect of exclusives like Final Fantasy X and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty in the fall.
I know things are a little different now but it still stands to reason that when a game is only available for one platform, and it's a game a LOT of people want to play, sales for that platform will rise.
Last edited by Ben Dutka PSXE on 5/28/2015 7:13:34 PM
The times were not just a little, but very different back then. Back then exclusivity were more or less the *norm*. If we go long enough back it was almost a headliner in itself when games were released for more than one platform.
But the PS2 was, if I remember correctly (and I may not, please forgive me if I don't but this is before my console time) not the console with the best technical performance, was it?
And that is my point: The less *other* arguments there are for a platform, the more the exclusives will matter, relatively speaking. I'm sure we all agree on that.
Also please notice that I'm not saying that it doesn't matter at *all*. Of course exclusive top-tier titles does add something to the brand, both in regards to moved units and profile. But I do think that people have grossly over-estimated their relative importance. As the current console sales figures speaks loudly about, if you ask me.
no i don't think share play alone will be is enough they really needed or will need something really good to go with it to make it worth while
happy gaming
Of course not on it's own. It's still a pretty great feature, though.
Haven't used shareplay once and the one time I tried my whole party of 8 were confused on even how to get it to work so we gave up.
I don't think the comment was intended to say Share Play alone will move PS4s, but there's nothing wrong with highlighting your hardware's features.
Also, if exclusives are the only truly motivating factor in console purchasing decisions, then both consoles are in trouble because the days of console exclusive games are coming to an end, and it's about damn time. It's one of the dumbest business models in entertainment. Imagine if you could only see Age of Ultron if you went to an AMC theater, but could only see Furious 7 if you went to the United Artists 30 miles away, and had to cross state lines to watch Mad Max Fury Road because it was only playing at one theater in a 75 mile radius from your house.
I don't see how anyone could complain if you could get Last of Us, Uncharted, Halo, Gears, GT, Forza, Super Mario Galaxy, Bayonetta and Zelda all on the same console, instead of dishing out $1200 for 3 different machines.
I agree, exclusiveness have always annoyed me.
The only valid argument for it is that focusing on one platform is an advantage to get the most out of it.
Optimization was definitely a valid argument back in the PlayStation/N64 and PlayStation 2/Xbox days when the different consoles' architecture was so different. Now that all platforms for the most part are operating on the same architecture we don't have to worry about that nearly as much.
I disagree. The core x86 architecture may be the same, but there are many other differences beyond that. The GPU and unified 8gbGDDR5 ram/vram of the ps4 vs the xbones 8gb of ddr3 ram with esram, for starts, I think the ps4 will prove to be much more superior in the long run, as if they don't already show that now.
The days exclusives are absolutely irrelevant is the day Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft join hands together and use the same lead designer, philosophy, and vision for a single game console… In other words, not happening.
Taking away exclusives is taking out the need to optimize. There have been zero evidence where a multiplat game outperforms or equally look as good as an exclusives best. Worst part is if developers optimizes to the lowest common denominator. Point is, without exclusives, there would be no competition in this world, and we need the competition. I'm not saying there should be plenty, only subtle enough to keep completion strong.
Last edited by daus26 on 5/28/2015 6:08:11 PM
Seriously, just imagine a console race with no exclusives. It would be a battle of hardware specs, and that can be ugly if the only purpose is in the specs and not unique, exclusive games that each company feels can help their image or be in part of their philosophy that takes them over the competition, other than better specs and graphics. And when the console industry is just focused on specs more than optimizing, then it'll just become a pc.
Other than exclusive online services like psn/xlive, what would the three company be able to do to make them different, in a world where games are the number one selling point? That's a shallow world imo.
The notion that we need different consoles to ensure competition makes zero sense. For starters, the differences you mentioned between PS4 and Xone are incredibly small compared to the differences between something like Cell and PowerPC.
Either way, developers and publishers would still be competing with one another just the way they are now. Ubi wants to sell more games than EA who wants to sell more than Activision etc. That would not change. They're still going to try and create the best games to make the most money. If anything a unified architecture makes that easier, not harder.
The only argument I can see for exclusives and multiple consoles is the weird obsession some people have with brand loyalty, like they can only enjoy games 7f they're on a Sony system or Xbox or whatever.
It won't stay that way forever, or even very long. Both Sony and MS lost huge on hardware last gen. The business model makes no fiscal sense anymore and the big three won't keep sinking billions into proprietary hardware platforms indefinitely.
It's certainly true that exclusives aren't as necessary as they once were, and the competing platforms are far more similar than ever before.
I get all that.
But that doesn't mean the architectures are identical and we're still seeing some differences between PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of multiplatform titles, both in terms of performance and stability. It also seems logical that when you have an internal development team focusing entirely on one platform, that team will invariably get more out of that platform because they can dive into the nuts and bolts without worrying about another form of architecture.
It is my opinion that the most stable games on earth are often exclusives (Uncharted and many other franchises spring to mind), and there's a very good reason for that. Had The Witcher 3 been exclusive to only one platform, I'm willing to bet it wouldn't have had a fraction of the problems it currently has. Same goes for games like Assassin's Creed.
Many designers have said they loved making games only for PlayStation platforms in the past, and there are reasons for that. Even now, if you ask Naughty Dog, they will tell you reasons why Uncharted 4 probably won't work – or work as well, at least – on Xbox One. Same might be said of Halo 5: Guardians or an Xbox One exclusive that got a chance to be optimized specifically for one platform.
Last edited by Ben Dutka PSXE on 5/28/2015 7:11:41 PM
Yes, there are differences between the two, but they're pretty insignificant in the larger picture, and especially compared to the difference between something like the PS2 and Xbox.
My main point is we'd still have competition in the industry even if we only had one main console manufacturer and PC. More importantly, you're right that developers sticking with one platform get more out of that platform than developers making multiplatform games. That's one reason why The Last of Us pretty much killed every other console game in the graphics department. Imagine if every developer had that advantage. It's win-win, because we all get better games and developers and publishers get to make those games for less money, both in terms of development and marketing/distribution costs.
At some point in the future I can see some sort of consortium developing where multiple companies come together to share costs and profits on one console, much the same way Sony collaborated with IBM and Toshiba on Cell. I don't know if MS will still be in the hardware game at that point, because I think they're inevitably going to leave that venture behind, but someone will step in to fill that gap.
I see Nintendo stepping out of the console business altogether at some point and sticking with handheld and mobile gaming, given the current cultural gaming trends in Japan.
There were definitely bigger differences before Bio, but man, there's still challenges.
Heck, if we single out the PC platform there's even compatibility issues within the platform itself. Ref the various gpu chipsets, amazingly enough there's even cpu issues.
Still – I'd love to see how well a game would perform that were written *specifically* for my exact PC setup. As it stands today, my PC rig that *on paper* should run in circles around my old PS3 while yoddling the alphabet backwards have a hard time delivering an as steady and fluid experience as the PS3 did.
So until we get that consortium of yours, we'll always see that the exclusive titles having an potential advantage of running better on the platform it's designed for.
But I don't care. I still want platform independent releases. 🙂
Last edited by Beamboom on 5/29/2015 3:21:45 AM
Hardware features do not sell consoles, or even really are that relevant when differentiating between consoles. Look no further than Kinect and all the silly TV features the Xbone has. Sony right now is still riding the wave of success that started back in 2013, so they don't have much of a reason to panic that they don't have many exclusives this year. Good for them, but kinda sucks for people like myself who got spoiled last gen with all of their awesome exclusive games.
Like others have said above, MS will be the one with the stronger line up of exclusives in the immediate future. One thing that is concerning to me is that Sony maybe using a lot of their first party studios to create games for VR stuff that I'm not really interested in. I hope that is not the reason we aren't seeing many exclusives this year. Guess we will have to wait until E3 to find out!