Sony: "Exlusives don't matter, except for MGS4 of course."
By 1oneWON 3 Comments
God, I hate starting discussions like this because I'm instantly an Xbox fanboy for calling out dumb Sony quotes and vice versa, but I'm putting my faith in you GiantBomb community. As I typed this though, this actually grew into a broader and larger question.
I saw this little tidbit on Kotaku and gave a roaring chuckle the hypocrisy within. During an interview with MTV, Sony's Peter Dille was asked about FFXIII going mulltiplatform. Here was his response.
Consumers responded to “GTA” on the PS3 just as they did on the 360. And it becomes a bit of a jump ball. But it didn’t rise the tide for them. And I think if you fast forward to when “Final Fantasy XIII” comes out I think you’re going to have millions of people who grew up playing “Final Fantasy” on the PlayStation playing it on a PlayStation 3. They spent a lot of money, I’m sure, to get “Final Fantasy” onto the 360 but at the end of the day it’s on our platform as well. Which is why we focus on, “Let’s look at what happens when you have “Metal Gear Solid” on your platform … when the NPD numbers come out … I think you’ll see the value of what a real exclusive title does and how it raised the bar for PS3 versus 360.He starts out making a lot of sense, when it comes to games going multiplatform it really splits the base so that the sales boost for both platforms is essentially equal. That makes sense. What doesn't make sense however is then dismissing the impact FFXIII could've had by saying that "well now it's multiplatform now so it'll sell well not only on the 360 but also on the PS3." He then follows up on it by talking about the importance of exclusivity, evident in the effect MGS4 had on PS3 sales.
What Dille did here was effectively dodge the question. He ends up advocating the importance of exclusivity, killing the point he was trying to make, which was that because FFXIII is on both platforms it's not that important. Well, it IS important, man, really f'n important. If PS3 had kept FFXIII exclusive then it would've boosted PS3 sales similarly to the way MGS4 did. Sony may have converted 50% of the 360's consumers into PS3 owners while the other 50% said "screw it, I'll just miss out then because I'm not dropping another 4 Benjis on a PS3."
But then that begs the question of how much that is worth to Sony? Is it more cost effective to dish out the cash to keep FFXIII exclusive, which may negate the sales boost of its exclusivity, or let it go multiplatform? If you keep it exclusive you'll probably end up spending so much money on that exclusive deal that the added sales boost for the FFXIII release is meaningless, but that at least converts 360 owners or would-be 360 owners into PS3 owners where you could hopefully sell them either other exclusives or (arguably) superior ports - at least graphically and performance wise. Either way you're bringing these people into the PlayStation family, and growing your installed base, and as with most industries - and particularly in the gaming industry - installed base is everything.