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[Felon]

Originally Posted by Steel_Wind

The whole concept of exclusive titles has essentially died. It was always a concept that occurred in the past more due to happenstance than by clever design or any real marketing inititative. If you think otherwise, well... for the most part, it just looked that way.

Don't know where you're getting this intel from. Exclusive titles are often aggressively pursued, at least in Microsoft's case. Mass Effect, Halo, Gears of War, and Fable are franchises they intend to pay to keep. Sony has recently spoken up and said they aren't going in that direction anymore.

Games simply cost too much to make. As a game developer, the only way to rationally recover your investment is to multi-sku your game across as many platforms as you can afford to implement the game on.

Indeed, games cost a lot to make, and they get more expensive when you design for multiple platforms. If a company steps up and offers you a million to design a game just for them, there's a reasonable incentive to take it. The PS3 has something of a rep for being hard to design games for. Saints Row spent a long time in development for the PS3 before they finally gave up and said "forget it--wait for the sequel". MS has the edge in that developing for the PC means you have a good foot in the door to develop for the Xbox.

The main issue with maintaining exclusive titles is saturation. Is it meaningful to be the platform that has an exclusive AAA FPS like Halo when there are so many FPS titles floating around for both consoles? Sales would seem to indicate that the answer is yes. Is it meaningful to have an exclusive suite of RPG's, like Fable and Mass Effect? That's a title MS has sought but can't be so sure of. Can the competitor just make do with the remaining cross-platform games, or will they just cancel out the edge by getting their own exclusive titles? At this point, MS may feel they have sufficient lead to get lazy, or they may want to try to keep forcing Sony to up the ante.