Many debates happen in the video game space that doesn’t have “true right answers.” One of the biggest ones is the debate over console exclusivity with video game titles. Many are ok with video games being exclusive systems because they’re tied to the “identity” of the system, and thus you have to support the system to get that special game. Others think it limits the sales of properties and thus hurts the gaming industry overall. The massive battle between Sony and Microsoft about the Activision Blizzard acquisition covered this topic, and the latter’s CEO had an interesting statement about exclusivity.
As noted by VGC, CEO Satya Nadella talked about his company and how he viewed the Xbox brand and the games they made for it, and when it came to exclusivity, he said that they have “always” tried to bring their games to multiple systems:
“I grew up in a company that always believed that software should run in as many platforms as possible, and that’s just the Microsoft I grew up in, I believe in that,” he said.
That’s an interesting take, and he was asked about the exclusives that the Xbox brand did have. He admitted that it was “necessary” to survive in a system that values exclusives over just about anything else. But if he had his way? Exclusives would be gone:
“If it was up to me, I would love to get rid of the entire, sort of, exclusives on consoles, but that’s not for me to define, especially as a low share player in the console market that the dominant player there has defined market competition using exclusives and so, that’s the world we live in.”
As noted, this is a rather complicated issue. It’s true that not having exclusives could open up the doors to everyone being able to play the games they want to without issue. However, that does put more work on the developers and publishers to not only port the games to every system out there but ensure that those ports are up to snuff. We know that that hasn’t always happened in the past, and gamers suffer as a result.
Plus, there’s the notion that if it’s on “every system,” then you only need to get the “best system available” to get all the games in “peak form.” That would drive people to one system over the other 9/10. Either way, the debate will continue.
