Recently it was announced that the next Tomb Raider game will be an Xbox One exclusive, which came as a surprised to fans and maybe the developers themselves. The rationale being that Microsoft’s support by making it exclusive will help the series grow as a brand. Or in other words — make Square Enix a lot of money. While there are risks and reasons for having exclusivity, the pros today outweigh the cons.
The Reasons for Exclusivity:
Platform exclusive titles have been a part of the industry since the early days of Atari and so on. Just like with any consumer driven industry, if someone has the newest/best item, which will drive people to that store. And that’s the same reasoning behind console exclusive titles.
Now it’s important to make the distinction between first party developed games or the ones made by the console maker. No one expects to see Halo on the Playstation 4 or the next Mario game on the Xbox One. And these are generally the most hyped titles as they are supposed to represent the system and can make or break sales.
With third party titles, things are different. A third party developer will normally not develop a game with the sole intention of releasing it on a single platform, but there is one exception.
If the platform provides some kind of unique functionality that the game is being developed around. Such as the Wii U’s control system or Steam integration and functionality for PC development.
Most often for a third party game to become console exclusive means that the console is paying the publisher a significant amount of money. The arrangement is supposed to be a win-win-lost: The publisher gets a lot of money that can either help pay towards development or be part of the profit, the platform maker gets an exclusive game that hopefully sells systems and the consumer gets screwed because they won’t be able to play it on their platform of choice.
First party titles are expected to remain platform exclusive as they are designed to be the spokesmen for the platform.
As we’ve talked about before, publishers are very risk adverse today thanks to the continuing rise of game development cost.
This is why for instance with the next Tomb Raider game that Square-Enix decided to go with a console exclusivity deal.
Both because it meant more money upfront and the fact that Tomb Raider was not a mass success for them even though it got great reviews. For those that forgot, Tomb Raider was considered a failure by Square Enix for I believe most of 2013. It wasn’t until a few months ago that Square Enix finally announced that the game sold well enough.
Console exclusivity works when you are talking about unique titles or first party, but in today’s market it’s better to go multi platform for several reasons.
Spreading the Love:
Multi Platform games first advantage is an obvious one: More people will get a chance to buy your game. Each console and platform has a market and the more platforms you can get your game on, the more chances that someone will buy your title for their specific market.
When I spoke with Yacht Club Games who did Shovel Knight, they knew that the market was there for 2D retro platformers on the Wii-U and 3DS. However they also felt that it would do well on the PC market and during our cast, they said that both platforms were selling about evenly. That means they were definitely doing better with Shovel Knight being multi platform as opposed to just on the console. And they are planning on releasing it on Linux and Mac I believe in a future update.
The point is that if you are looking for a game to do really well, it needs to be on multiple platforms.
Making the Most out of the Platform:
Another big reason for multi platform releases is that great developers can tailor the game to each respective platform. This can be as simple as unique control schemes, all the way up to adding steam workshop support, trading cards and so on.
When Firaxis made XCOM Enemy Unknown multi platform, they knew that they needed to create a console exclusive version of the UI for that audience. And by doing so, they made XCOM one of the few strategy games to do very well on both the console and PC market.
Big name titles like GTA 5 were massive successes and part of that was not limiting it to a single platform or market.
The advantages of multi platform games means increase profit for your studio, however there are a few risks that we need to talk about.
The Risk of a Weak Link:
For every platform that you release your game on means that more versions need to be tested and made sure that they work perfectly. This also adds complexity to the game’s development as you have to make sure that your game actually works on each platform.
This is where massive titles like GTA 5, Skyrim and others can run into problems. One version may be better than the other or have bugs that aren’t fixed.
Payday 2 for instance is having this problem with the PC version being arguably the superior one compared to the consoles. This is because the console versions have not been updated anywhere near as frequently due to certification issues. But this also means that the console fans aren’t as happy with Overkill and this could affect them on their next multi platform release.
Each platform that you are going to support means additional time and money spent and if your game does bomb, then it doesn’t just bomb on one platform but every one that you spent money developing towards.
Making the Choice:
In the end it comes down to risk vs. reward: Do you spend the additional money to make more versions of your game and hope that the markets accept it? Obviously the reward is there and we’ve seen plenty of developers hit it big with a multi platform game.
Despite the news of Tomb Raider’s exclusivity, most of us feel that it is only going to be short lived and that eventually the game will go multi platform. As limiting a big name game to one platform means limiting your potential market and is not something that a lot of developers want to lose on in the long run.
