We're gonna complain about console timed-exclusivity? Really? OK, well there should be only one home console allowed to be made since that's inconvenient to my wallet and solves your timed-exclusivity woes.
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So Timed Exclusives are still a thing...
- Thread starter Ocarina_117
- Start date
Xbox Wire posted about them last E3 when they were announced. They don't do that for games not coming to their platform. Disregarding that...it's games from Bethesda. There's zero reason for them to be exclusive to any platform other than money in hats.
E3 2019: Doom Eternal, Fallout’s Battle Royale, and Ghostwire: Tokyo Revealed at Bethesda’s E3 Keynote - Xbox Wire
We knew going in that Bethesda’s E3 keynote would not have big reveals — and no, there was no footage from The Elder Scrolls 6 or Starfield. The company’s presser did feature a handful of notable game updates and expansions, a couple new title reveals, and the much-anticipated reveal of new...news.xbox.com
Neither GhostWire nor Deathloop were officially announced for any platforms when they had those CG reveal trailers. It was considered to be a safe bet that they would come to Xbox, yes, but what he's saying is not untrue. Just got back and look at those E3 reveal trailers.
Idk. They'll probably be free in game pass after the exclusivity period anyway
MS "publishes" a lot of games they buy timed exclusivity for. It's just how they like to structure their deals.
The fact is this will always be a thing. It doesn't matte that Phil Spencer talked pretty to you about it a few years ago. The primary reason MS slowed the practice was because it made no sense to continue throwing good money after bad while they were losing so badly in the console market.
And every deal is different. I really doubt we would have gotten FF7 Remake the way we did without the seed money Sony kicked in. They jump started the development of Street Fighter 5 as well with their investment. Many indie devs are going to use the windfall to make their games better in the long run. For devs like Arkane and Tango, a boost from Sony could keep them from having to make hard cuts after their previous games underperformed.
There's a gigantic difference between investing/helping AA/indies devs with their game in exchange for it's exclusivity, and just straight out throw cash at AAA games just to prevent it to reach others platforms for a limited time.
Without a doubt games like Bridge Of Spirits, the Housemarque one and Destruction AllStars received investment from Sony in exchange for the exclusivity (be it timed or not). It's the same thing MS did with The Ascent, The Medium and Scorn, and that's kinda good for the industry.
Now shit like Deathloop, Rise Of The Tomb Raider, Project Athia, Ghostwire Tokyo, FFVIIR is/was just a shitty move all around and should be condemned as such, but i guess everything depends of which company does it.
Nope. PUBG not only received development support from MS, but also provided the platform for early access and direct feedback with consumers. The same situation with Crossfire X.
Also, Arkane and Tango are owned by Zenimax-Bethesda, so wth you're even talking about? The same can be said about FF7R, a remake of one of the highest rated JRPG that it's part of a gigantic multiplatform franchise. The though of Square needing the Sony money is just laughable, It doesn't make any sense, even more when it's a TIMED exclusive. I'll give you SFV, Sony really helped Capcom and thus the exclusivity is justified.
Without a doubt games like Bridge Of Spirits, the Housemarque one and Destruction AllStars received investment from Sony in exchange for the exclusivity (be it timed or not). It's the same thing MS did with The Ascent, The Medium and Scorn, and that's kinda good for the industry.
Now shit like Deathloop, Rise Of The Tomb Raider, Project Athia, Ghostwire Tokyo, FFVIIR is/was just a shitty move all around and should be condemned as such, but i guess everything depends of which company does it.
Nope. PUBG not only received development support from MS, but also provided the platform for early access and direct feedback with consumers. The same situation with Crossfire X.
Also, Arkane and Tango are owned by Zenimax-Bethesda, so wth you're even talking about? The same can be said about FF7R, a remake of one of the highest rated JRPG that it's part of a gigantic multiplatform franchise. The though of Square needing the Sony money is just laughable, It doesn't make any sense, even more when it's a TIMED exclusive. I'll give you SFV, Sony really helped Capcom and thus the exclusivity is justified.
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Eh, what about Call of the Sea and The Medium? This take seems rather one-sided, unless you made a similar thread after the other event.
AFAIK, Call of the Sea is exclusive indefinitely, which is far worse than timed exclusivity. At least you can play the timed ones eventually on the system you have.
As for The Medium, it was originally announced for all consoles.
As much as I hate exclusivity deals, when the games would have been made regardless of them (unlike, say, Bayonetta 2 and Bloodborne), the timed deals are at least tolerable and understandable when smaller studios have limited resources.
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Forgot those two. Hopefully all those indies will eventually come to both platforms, like many of the early games of this gen did.
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I understand the business side of things, in some cases the dev taking the money is the ony way to get the game made, some times the platform securing an exclusive is the only way they see to attract new buyers, and im sure many many other reasons.
These reasons are legitimate and an exclusivity deal are often part of this arrangement, but having a game only be available to a subsection of the public is always a negative to the people wanting to play games.
I blame the people with the money, the ones making the contracts and terms. I doubt it is the dev saying "we will take your money, thank you very mucb, but then WE only want the game to be on your platform now"
This is a somewhat narrow view of looking at things:
Games like Deathloop, Project Athia and Ghostwire Tokyo are all new IP and are thus a higher financial risk for companies. A lot of companies like to take less risk with new IP, to the point where (as an example) the internal marketing budget of the whole project might be decreased in order to increase chances of recouped costs. Bethesda, who published Dishonored, Dishonored 2, Doom, Elder Scrolls, etc know plenty about the cost of new IP vs. already known IP.
Let's say, just for example purposes (actual numbers are much higher usually): Bethesda has budgeted 2 million dollars for marketing for Deathloop, compared to their usual $10+ million dollar marketing campaign for their big IPs like Doom. Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo walk in the door, take a look at a game like Deathloop and say "Hey, we think this game would be great on our platform and if you sign a 6-month exclusivity window agreement we will give you $8 million in marketing dollars to help".
Whether you are a publisher as big as Bethesda or as small as a one-person indie team, that kind of financial swing (going from having to spend $2 million of your own money to $8 million of someone else's money) also has other implications: Bigger marketing budget might mean more people playing it which would mean higher sales of the game, for instance, which changes backend financial calculations as more money ends up going to the Publisher, Developer AND platform holder due to higher sales, which can create win/win/win scenarios.
And that's just a very basic marketing deal offering. When you start getting into the really complex deals like Call of Duty, Destiny (that it formerly had), and Grand Theft Auto, the deals have an even bigger potential impact with more reprecussions. You can argue that none of these projects "need" external cash injection..but it is not easy turning down million-dollar cash incentives (among other things) that would save you large amounts of costs and cause your game to be even more profitable.
Even on the biggest projects in the world, spending someone else's money and potentially increasing your projected profits because of it is always a tempting deal and always will be a tempting deal, which is why platform "owned" marketing deals happen all the time (Cyberpunk is a great example of this). I'm not saying it is/is not a good idea to accept these kinds of deals as that is always subjective, but I completely understand why developers and publishers regularly say yes to these kinds of things. Game development is absurdly expensive.
Great post.
Personally at this point it's more of a distaste of the concept then the practice as a whole because as you mentioned risk management/migration is a factor for everyone big or small. Although with publishers I feel platform aligned marketing should be the extent of any exclusivity imo unless it's a titanfall situation (The reason for the initial 13 months of exclusivity) delaying games for x platforms still feels wrong.
Saying all that I think one of the main issues has been clarity in what the exclusivity entails when things are announced. In the past it's not always been clear i.e Rise of Tomb raider that needed 3 or 4 statements from official channels to fully clarify things. Things have got better at least as far exclusivity information coming post event announcement.
Oh yea, as a video game fan sometimes these exclusivity announcements (or exclusive content announcements) drive me nuts, so I fully get where people are coming from.
As someone that works in and around the video game industry though, these deals always make complete sense to me from a business perspective, even things like Stadia exclusivity, since companies are willing to pay through the nose for content right now, especially if content can be "exclusive" to them.
From a marketing perspective, I agree with you that some messaging in the past has been extremely muddied and oftentimes straight up confusing, so teams need to better equip themselves with people who know how to properly thread the needle on messaging. I think things have gotten much better for the most part although there are still some absolutely baffling responses. My own personal opinion: A lot of dev teams only have one person (if even that) on tap from a marketing perspective, often an underpaid community manager, who is expected to try and thread the needle on really delicate and important messaging that is usually handled by product marketing, product ownership, marketing directors or people with far more experience. It's why I am not surprised that things are confusing at times.
Ono clarified Sony's investment only accelerated the release, Capcom was planning to fund dev regardless on a slower timetable. Given the state it launched in (and underperformed badly upfront as a result) I think there a solid case to make SFV may have been better off launching a year or two later in a more complete state (and also on Xbox/Switch). I bet it would've outsold SFIV for one.
It's notable Capcom isn't throwing Sony any exclusives this go round yet too.
Wouldn't even be mad if Deathloop was 6 months exclusive, 1 year wait is sooo long. At least I'll have Elden Ring and Hitman 3
Personally I am perfectly fine with timed exclusives as long as everyone is transparent about it up front. I just don't want to buy a game and then later find out it's just timed and will come to my platform of choice and I have to buy it again. I am fine with waiting as long as I know it's coming.
This is my biggest problem with the announcements yesterday. I agree deals can make sense from a business standpoint, but the language used was at least confusing if not intentionally misleading. Project Athia had "designed exclusively for PS5", which is just not true, as it's releasing on PC the same day. The second trailer after the show didn't even say that anymore, and we found out it's coming to other consoles, too. Then those large blue posters saying "console exclusive" with a small start beneath it "exclusive for a short time". And lastly, even Bethesda and Arkane used the same language as PlayStation in their blog for Ghostwire: Tokyo and Deathloop: "Launching exclusively on PS5 this holiday". Not technically wrong, but I believe the "releases first on PS5" which was used for much of this gen was much more transparent and honest messaging.
And major gaming newssites reported on the exclusivity the same way that PlayStation did without mentioning timed exclusivity. So this further confuses people who do not dig deeper on ERA like us.
Nope. Look at all the Xbox Arcade games in the 360 era that MS "published" that were defacto self published games with an exclusivity deal.
Good post. That explains timed exclusivity, but what about indefinite one, like it's apparently with Call of the Sea? Locking out two other platforms (PS5 and Nintendo) for eternity seems like a bad idea for a small studio, especially if one or both of those platforms end up being succesful.
Don't see a problem with timed exclusiveness. If you are bothered by it you could always not buy it on the console it is timed exclusive until it is released on the rest :). Then slowly it will not be worth it anymore.
Everyone does it, and it sucks. EGS is the worst though, so lame to pull that shit in the PC space.
That was a result of the (antiquated) XBLA system requiring indie developers to have "slots" with a publisher to be on the market place. Publishers involvement would vary from game to game, though their certainly are games they funded. Thankfully they revised the system, with ID@Xbox being much more friendly to indie developers.
We have seen a few bigger games where they have taken on some publishing duties (whether it be marketing, distribution, or partial funding). It's the reason why Dead Rising 3 just says 'Microsoft" on the case and not the "Microsoft Games Studios" branding. Rise of the Tomb Raider's case also just has a line with Microsoft's legal info on the back where the publisher info goes. These sort of "second party" deals vary a lot.
You pretty much already mentioned the reason: small studio. Porting games to other consoles can be very expensive, especially if engines were designed or configured in such a way to mainly support one or two specific platforms.
Porting games to other consoles is technically easier than ever, but you still often need some devs with experience on the platform, you still need a normal QA pass, at least one additional QA certification pass and there are a whole bunch of other considerations that factor into the equation as well.
OP
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Ha tbh I wasn't expecting the amount shown. Matt Booty mentioned 22 console launch exclusives
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Salesmen with Pepsodent smiles never let a little hypocrisy be a bother.
Yeah, the silence from certain quarters that were very vocal about this subject around the date of this thread's creation has been deafening today... how odd.
Yeah, for someone who decries times exclusives as much as Spencer, there sure were a lot of them there today, huh.
Timed exclusives are bullshit. They're bullshit when Sony does them. They're bullshit when Nintendo does them. And they're bullshit when Microsoft does them.
I wish the practice would just fucking die.
Timed exclusives are bullshit. They're bullshit when Sony does them. They're bullshit when Nintendo does them. And they're bullshit when Microsoft does them.
I wish the practice would just fucking die.
In before the usual excuse, that they're somehow not really the same as they're on XB and PC, both of which are MS platforms.
Still haven't changed my opinion on it. These timed and console launch exclusives are garbage. No matter who is doing them.
I think Sony got the bigger Timed Exclusives of the 2, and I still support cases like The Medium and Bugsnax, but it was disappointing to see that. I think both systems are shaping up to have rather barren 2020/2021 slates thus far and so they are opening the chequebooks to compensate.
the good thing all the timed exclusives games will come to PC day one lol
18 timed exclusives across MS and Sony, as a mainly PC player not a big deal everything coming to PC day one and even if it's not I'll just buy the console.
I can understand people on Ps5 or Xbox Series X only being pissed but eh they want to sell their own consoles and they need these shady tactics.
Honestly I approve timed exclusives for titles from indie devs, making games is hard, expensive and risky and if you can snatch a deal to secure your studio im not condoning you, The Medium, Kena, Bugsnax, Warhammer game etc... Are all from small devs or AA devs and I have no problem with this, but major publishers like Square Enix, Bethesda, Smilegate and SEGA doing timed exclusives? That's whack, they don't need money and they can release their games everywhere.
I can understand people on Ps5 or Xbox Series X only being pissed but eh they want to sell their own consoles and they need these shady tactics.
Honestly I approve timed exclusives for titles from indie devs, making games is hard, expensive and risky and if you can snatch a deal to secure your studio im not condoning you, The Medium, Kena, Bugsnax, Warhammer game etc... Are all from small devs or AA devs and I have no problem with this, but major publishers like Square Enix, Bethesda, Smilegate and SEGA doing timed exclusives? That's whack, they don't need money and they can release their games everywhere.