In recent years, the conversation surrounding console exclusives has only gotten more contentious. Xbox spearheaded this change with its desire to port almost all of its exclusive franchises to Nintendo and PlayStation consoles. Minecraft is on the Switch, the Ori games are multiplatform, and the bigwigs at Microsoft have promised to bring Call of Duty to a Nintendo console eventually. Still, old-school publishers like Nintendo are adamant about having Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon on their consoles only. Whether the consumer likes it or not, exclusives will still matter to them, and it’s no wonder why, in the history of gaming, the console with the most stuff always succeeds.
But looking to the future and how gaming has become so mainstream, the need to have a huge system selling first-party games to sell your system is making less and less sense as the years go by. For example, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild helped sell the Nintendo Switch as it launched separately at retail. However, it wasn’t exclusive because it was the last Nintendo-published game released on the failed Wii U system. It was just a really cool game, and the Switch was exciting enough to captivate audiences, even with the benefit of having a system seller to call its own on the launch date. So, if the world’s biggest gaming company can get away with it, then why do we need these things in the first place?
We don’t, but exclusives are becoming more and less lucrative for these companies. They keep flip-flopping on them. One moment, Xbox wants to put nearly its entire library on every console, and the next, they’re advertising the heck out of Halo Infinite. That’s without mentioning the PC, which is its world, and how the VR industry has self-sabotaged itself, considering how companies like Meta have treated the whole thing.
So, if we got rid of exclusives and just had a single video game console that played everything, then more games would be sold, and Pokemon would finally be able to look half-decent for once in its life. It seems great, but then you consider how hard it would be for so many people to move on from 30-plus years of home console gaming and how companies like Nintendo make a killing off of console sales: yeah, it doesn’t too sound great.
So, to wrap up all this excess rambling, it definitely seems like the industry is slowly moving away from relying on exclusives as we have more multiplatform games than ever. Trillion-dollar corporations are paving the way forward, and with the hobby being more mainstream, the barrier to entry has lowered significantly. Will it all go up in smoke in the next five years? Probably not, but the importance of exclusives seems to be weakening as the years go by…
