Sony has been at the top of the ‘exclusive games’ ever since the PS2 and with this year’s strong E3 performance, clearly Sony is taking it up a notch. Sony has kept winning for many years, but this time it was like ripping other shows inside out. Previously at least Ubisoft and EA tried to compete, but this time it seemed that they had a stale welcome to E3 and Sony had quite a king’s reception. Sony had a crowd, bustling with joy and excitement, surely the result of the hard work they have put in for the past 3 years building the PS4 brand.
Unlike Microsoft who have extended their hands to the PC community (I still can’t judge if it is good or bad), Sony came out with quite a few impressive looking exclusive titles (I was ranting about Spiderman being exclusive to PS4 a few days back). What Microsoft gave us was a new piece of more powerful hardware but that does not mean better games. Sure we have some decent games coming out from Microsoft like Scalebound and Recore, but unlike Sony, the list of anticipated games is lower in number.
Somewhere on the internet I had seen in the comments that “What is the use of hardware upgrade, if there are no games to test the hardware or no games to run” and it is practically true.
There are many console exclusives listed for the PS4 and this is a good time for gamers, but it’s not all goody two shoes out there. Here are some positive and negative impacts that might possibly occur at the decision of Sony making more exclusives for their consoles.
Positives:
Being a PS4 gamer makes you a proud owner of the system, on which many first party exclusives are coming. “Oh stop it Sony!”, you can almost hear the PS4 owners say it in unison.
There are a lot of positives of games being made exclusive to the Sony gaming system and each one of them high quality. One of the most obvious repercussion of this is competitiveness. I mean seeing that Sony is making such high caliber games, it’s obvious that Microsoft and PC developers will try to follow their footsteps and try to live up to gamers’ expectations (It’s another case whether they will be able to achieve it or not).
The only exception in this example will be Nintendo, who have basically made whatever their heart desires, whenever it desires and have printed money in the process.
Expect Better PC ports by Microsoft: This maybe an advantage to PC gamers only, but considering how horrendous the Quantum Break port was, Microsoft is now dangling on a thin thread. They have already pissed off a section of the Xbox fanboys by extending their hands to the PCs and also have done the same to PC owners by giving shitty ports of two of their most valued franchises; Quantum Break and Gears of War.
Now it’s Microsoft’s last chance to redeem themselves by giving better ports and better games on the PCs, because they have lost the trust of a chunk of their loyalists and PC gamers are their only helplines left. And I’m telling you Microsoft, if you give decent ports of your upcoming games, PC gamers will eat up those games like Americans consume hamburgers.
Apart from competitiveness, another positive impact of the exclusives is the content of the games. It’s not that Sony will just make exclusives for exclusives sake. For example, now that Insomniac has taken responsibility over the Spiderman games, we might finally get a good Spiderman game, after so many years of shitty Spiderman games (I did a lot of thinking after that rant!).
Not only that, we have seen some amazing footage at E3 and hope for the best. They did great at E3 and I’m expecting all games from it to go boom commercially. Developers will have to come up with new and creative ideas to survive if they are looking to compete with the PlayStation platform.
Of course a big positive out of all of this is that Sony’s player base will increase dramatically. Though there are games coming exclusive to each platform, it is undeniable to see Sony’s rise to the peak of console gaming and unless you are hiding beneath a rock or are a hardcore PC gamer who plays the niche of the niche titles, you will want to dig in at the console at some point of a time. And we can also see that, with the impressive list of upcoming games to the PS4, many people will be wetting their hands (Oh wait that came out wrong, but you get what I mean, right?) over the console. This will only result in a larger player base and more players online than other platforms for AAA games and hence a larger multiplayer crowd (Can’t say better or worse).
The Not So Positives:
Sony has taken Spiderman as an exclusive (I will let it go soon, I promise) and we can’t be sure if it’ll release on PC or not, but we are definitely sure that the game will never be seeing daylight on Xbox. Does the Xbox crowd care? Yes. Does Microsoft care? A bigger yes. You see, capturing titles as exclusive to a console has been a Microsoft tactic. And many Sony gamers, till this day remember what Microsoft did to them by taking away Splinter Cell. The Rise of The Tomb Raider is supposed to be a timed exclusive which is yet to see the daylight on PS4. I bet very few people from the PS4 side will get ROTR now after almost a year of it’s release. As for Microsoft, they might just take up another AAA game developer to their side. It’s a different case that they might screw up, but none the less, hardcore fans of certain titles can get very pissed.
More and more exclusives is a good thing for the gamers in general, but so many exclusives actually widens the gap between gamers and platforms and also also takes a part of the experience away.
Previously it was Xbox v PS v PC, and developers only used to develop for the consoles, because then they knew that the consoles were the bread winners, but with the three platforms turning into two, we could see them taking sides by either Sony or Microsoft and this is bad news for the gamers with just two platforms competing for the market.
For now Microsoft and Sony, both have some exclusives, but with Microsoft trying to snuggle into the PC community, there will be exclusives between two sides only, ie, Microsoft and Sony.
If this continues on, there will be a huge library on both sides and there will be a lot of people who haven’t experienced each other’s titles. Is this truly what we, as general gamers want?
Well, these are my views as a general gamer and after all, this is all just speculation. What are your thoughts on the many overflowing Sony exclusives? Do you agree with the above views or do you disagree. Do let us know in the comments below.
That Sony conference was absolutely stunning. Pure class with the symphony orchestra, and the games looked so damn good they had some people questioning whether they were running on a Neo. Incredible E3 performance. Incredible games incoming.
Couldn’t agree more.
Now, This is what you call a good article unlike the previous rant article lol.
They learn and improve I say.
Not that great, doesn’t list any Sony exclusives other than Spider-Man and doesn’t list the announced titles by Microsoft for their PC cross-play feature. It’s pretty much a clickbait article that doesn’t go into any details.
Well he did say Good…not great… 😀
The article is not based on what exclusives are coming out. Anyone who is into gaming knows that there are a lot of AAA Sony exclusives and I have just wanted to depict what will happen if they are of good quality.
Yeah I understand that but for people who don’t follow every announcement it is great to have reminders of what is coming out on the horizon and dropping the game names will also make your search results higher I believe. Just trying to give some feedback as to why I didn’t enjoy the article so much as I could’ve.
Thanks for the feedback, I will keep that in mind while writing all my future articles.
I think the author is slightly misguided. There is no doubt that Sony has great exclusives. My most recent purchases was Uncharted 4. But many fanboys talk about Sony exclusives like this is why people buy the console. When it was PS3 vs 360, the Microsoft exclusives consistently out-sold Sony. Did you see the E3 Twitter study this year? Microsoft had more tweet attention than Sony, which was surprising. Does this mean anything? No. Halo 5 is the top selling exclusive for either console so far and Gears 4 will out-do that. But I dislike Halo 5 and I don’t play Gears. But sometimes its difficult to look outside the gaming scene bubble and realize reality is much different.
Well, I’m not going to go into the whole ‘Which console’s exclusives are better’. My focus here was the amount of exclusives they are making for the console. It was not about quality alone, it was also about quantity. I personally think that Microsoft have done a sincere job this generation where they have added backward compatibility, unlike Sony who have just earned a shitload of money by making remasters. And you can’t call me a fanboy since I don’t own either of the systems. But as a PC gamer, I looked at that from my end, if Sony increases quality Microsoft will have to. Microsoft hmay have had more tweets, but what do you think would have been the tweets about. I’m betting they were all based on Scorpio and very few on the games. Sony was an all games show, which I appreciate more than Xbox’s unveiling of Play Anywhere and Project Scorpio.
The xbox360 backwards compatibility is a software engineering masterpiece. Translating games designed for a PowerPC processor into x86 code and having it run great is an amazing technical feat. Sure it would be nice for the PS4 to have some backwards compatibility but the Cell processor is a nightmare to try and emulate. Sony have tried though with the PS Now subscription where the PS3 games library is streamed over the internet running on a virtualized PS3 & like you said the copious amount of remasters.
I wonder how much that technological masterpiece helps MS, as it didn’t help Sony during the PS3 times. Apart from good PR of course.
That helps in maintaining the crowd towards Xbox. I mean I wouldn’t buy a game that I paid 60$ in the prev gen and would dish out another 60$ for some improved textures and a lot more pixels for the same gameplay and story.
Sony only had PS2 backwards compatibility for the very initial models of PS3 before removing it. I would use it if it was in the console still. I think that it helps MS a lot because with their monthly free games you can play the 360 titles on the XB1 and being a previous generation they can give away very high quality games as part of it. Sometimes I wish I could play the PS3 games given in Plus on my PS4 =(
I also pass up a lot of PS3 sales on the store because I use the PS4 primarily these days and my PS3 is overheating when in use so I need to dedicate some time to pulling it apart and re-doing all the thermal pads and paste and blow all the dust and stuff out. There are a lot of fantastic PS3 and XB360 games that would benefit from backwards compatibility.
I agree on the front that I wish I can play those PS3 games on my PS4 front. But somehow I don’t think it’s a factor that drives as much sales as other factors such as exclusives, and price and the all important ‘my friend already owns Xbox/PS4’
While to each is own. I think ‘Exclusive is the reason behind buying a console’ is possibly the most valid reason of them all.
If you wanna play Halo and Gears, it would make little sense to buy the PS4.
Vice-versa if you want to play games like Uncharted and God Of War.
I would be hard pressed to pick a platform over each other, not based on their game library.
And as it stands right now, Sony definitely has the better library.
What disappointing a gamer most is when an exclusive jumps ship or a cross-platform becomes an exclusive.
While I agree with @pratyushezio96:disqus that most of the tweets coming out of E3 for MS were about Hardware rather than software, I don’t think Sony has shamelessly printed money for the past 3 years. They have created a strong and focused message with the PS4 and they are now reaping the rewards for it.
About the part where reality is a much different. You are right. While MS struggles in comparison to Sony, both of them are doing quite well.