Yoichi Wada of Square Enix has let the cat out of the bag. The cat is Final Fantasy XIII for the Xbox 360 and it will be simultaneously released with the PlayStation 3 version. This may be an end to an exclusive era for Sony as all their big brands jump to non-exclusion.
This is probably a result of gamers slow adoption of the PlayStation 3 hardware for various issues, one being cost. Personally I think Sony’s move to say “no price cut” in our near future is a grand mistake. It is well understood that they want profitability over quantity but you’re losing your exclusives to a broader audience.
Each generation of consoles brings new industry trends and, for now, exclusive games from third party developers is too risky when you look at overall cost to produce a block buster title like Final Fantasy XIII. Consider the sales of GTA IV, although they were in the millions, imagine how low it would have been if they only released on the PS3. They’d might have actually lost money on the game.
Square Enix can see the writing on the wall, that writing says “ship on as many mediums as possible.” Gamers are split between consoles with a huge segment on Wii and Xbox 360, if you can at least ship on one of those consoles along with the PS3 you’ll do better financially.
(Thanks, Kotaku)
Hi guys.
Thanks again for this nice episode. Sorry that I was a little bit lazy writing comments under the last episodes, but I had to much thing going on :/
Regarding the topic of this thousand crappy small games on steam: I totally agree. There is so many useless shit there, it’s hard to find the good ones (and I bet there are many we will never find). On the other side, I don’t like that every company tries to run their own shop, because so you have to search / look through so many platforms that it feels like work :/
Best games of the year: i did not really played many actual games, because most of the time I played Magic The Gathering Arena and Hearthstone. Some Overwatch and Battlefield 5 the last weeks. BF makes fun because I play it with my friends, I would not have bought it to play it on my own 🙂
I bought some games, but did not find the way play it. These were Mega Man 11, Detroit become Human, Toki (the new Switch Version) and some shmups for the PS4. I think the only actual title I played so far is Life is Strange 2 (episode 1). Hollow Knight was released 2017, but I bought it some months ago. I love those metroidvania games and I am playing hollow knight a lot during the last weeks 🙂 I Stimm want to play God of War and Red Dead Redemption 2, but there are so many games I wanna play, I will wait with these two until they get a little bit cheaper 🙂
I hope all of you had a great New Year’s Eve and celebrated it with your friends and family. I am looking forward to a good 2019 with a lot of good games and many episodes of your podcast. Stay healthy and the way you are.
Greetings from your loyal listener,
Ralf