Earlier this year, Microsoft raised a debate in the gaming community about the validity of the idea of exclusives. The company announced that it will release some games from internal studios on competitors' consoles, and in the coming months Sea of Thieves, Gorunded and Hi-Fi Rush will appear on Playstation and Nintendo, and the release of Pentiment has already taken place.
Another well-known expert in the gaming industry who spoke about his position on the exclusivity of games for certain platforms was Sean Layden, the former head of Playstation Studios. According to him, game development costs have now increased significantly compared to what they were 5-10 years ago. At the same time, the target audience of companies that close exclusives on their platforms is not growing.
Sean Layden
CEO of SIE Worldwide Studios until 2019
Now that you have to spend over $200 million to make a game, exclusivity is your Achilles heel. It reduces the target market. Especially when you are in the same world with many free games and live service games. Entering a new platform is just another way to reach more people. (…) Helldivers 2 became a shining example for the Playstation. By releasing the game simultaneously on PC, they were able to attract many more people.
For single-player games this is not so necessary, but still. If you're spending $250 million, you want to be able to sell the game to as many people as possible, even if it only results in 10% more sales. The global gaming console user base, even if you go back to the days of Playstation 1 and add up all the consoles around the world by then, it will never exceed 250 million devices.
Also, Sean Layden is not sure that all console games released by internal studios should be AAA projects. Nowadays, creating such games requires huge budgets. If back in 2018 the Sony team spent about $100 million on the release of Spider-Man, now they have spent $300 million on the sequel. Sony projects are still selling well on their platform, but costs have increased significantly.
Sean Layden believes that it makes sense to invest more in AA games, given the already large number of AAA projects on the market.
Sean Layden
CEO of SIE Worldwide Studios until 2019
It seems to me that we are now stuck with the AAA level: 80 hours of gameplay with a 50 GB game size. We think that if our project is not like this, then it will not be able to achieve success. I hope there will be a return to AA gaming soon. Personally, I'm all for it.
Looking back at the Playstation 2 era, I see so much variety. There was God of War and Assassin's Creed. But there was also Loco Roco, SingStar and Dance Dance Revolution. You had the full range of entertainment options. With a price tag of $7-12 million per development. Why not bet on it now and see what happens? (…) But now, with each development costing in the triple-digit millions, risk tolerance is very low. As a result, you get copycats and sequels on release, and nothing more.
Let's remember that former head of Xbox Peter Moore spoke about exclusivity and the future of gaming consoles.