Discussion: How important are Console Exclusive Games?
To get the obvious out of the way, I recognize console exclusivity to be an important statistic for selling units. No matter how powerful the console is, if it does not provide exclusive games then it has little to offer over its competitors. However, are exclusives paramount to the console's success?
An obvious example of console exclusives helping a console's popularity would be the first PlayStation. When Sony entered the gaming scene at the start of the fifth console generation, they had to prove to consumers how their console was superior to the Sega Saturn and the upcoming Nintendo 64. With accessible development options and over a half gigabyte of data available on a single disc, the PlayStation was able to capture the attention of famous developers to develop for their console exclusively. A famous developer who jumped ship would be Square Soft, who had plans for ambitious titles over a gigabyte in size. The PlayStation is now currently Sony's second best selling console only behind the PlayStation 2 and was the best selling console in the fifth generation.
However, exclusives did not save the Wii U from its commercial failure. While it is trendy to jab at the Wii U for lacking games, it had twice as many top-rated exclusives than the PS4 and X Box One combined at the beginning of 2016. However, most of these exclusives are from Nintendo themselves or developers under contract with Nintendo. The Wii U was infamous for being gimmicky, underpowered, poorly marketed, and hard to develop games for and either lacked or had inferior versions of multiplatform games.
The biggest difference between the PlayStation and the Wii U is not specifically the games they had, those seem to be a side effect to bigger defining aspects of the console. PlayStation is easy to develop for and the Wii U was not.
There are exceptions. The PlayStation 3 was also a console with confusing architecture that developers at first didn't want to develop for and also had inferior versions of games also on the X Box 360. However, the PlayStation 3 was the most powerful console for its time. Sony decided to focus on that aspect of the console in its marketing and that was enough to push sales to the point for developers to start bothering to understand the console.
These events are important to remember because this generation seems to be presenting us with two extremes. The X Box One, a powerful console that has plenty of multiplatform titles but is experiencing trouble trying to obtain exclusives. Then there is the Switch, an underpowered console that shows plenty of promise in its exclusives but is struggling to get multiplatform titles.
Gamers were quick to point out that Microsoft's E3 2017 press conference presented very few exclusives. The new games presented were either timed exclusives or were also games coming to PC. Despite this, the X Box One doesn't seem to be a commercial failure. Microsoft focusing on the power of the upcoming X Box One X might lead to similar results as we have seen with the PlayStation 3.
The Nintendo Switch has the architecture similar to a tablet. Given that the device is roughly 1/16th the mass of its competitors it is understandable why it is also only a fraction of its power. Indie developers have claimed the console is easy to develop for. However, several third parties have claimed that they are not able to port some of their largest games on to the console. While the Switch is seeing success and praise the Wii U has not, it's currently experiencing a similar issue where it is seen from developers as an underpowered device that is not worth understanding.
There may not have been anything in this article readers have never heard of before. What's important and the reason I wrote this article was to show that a console's success isn't determined by a number of exclusives it has, or even that the exclusives indicate how well it's doing. This may seem like a logical fallacy since many gamers use exclusives to justify the purchase of a new console, perhaps these gamers really only make up a vocal minority.
I guess we will have to wait and see how the Switch and X Box One X performs in the next few years to say for sure.
