![]() Look at something like God of War from Sony's perspective: You can bet when this was first discussed, the question of whether it would dull the lustre of the PlayStation brand was raised. PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X still need to have something you can't get elsewhere but, after a while, the perception of bringing something like Demon's Souls to PC won't matter so much. ![]() But now there are countless millions of other machines in the world capable of playing those games.Įxclusivity isn't dead: It's just timed now. The old concept of consoles was very much the razor blade model: You sold great hardware at a loss, and you made money over the years to come from a cut on every title sold. The wider issue, however, is that PC gaming is bigger than it's ever been, and even a mid-range rig can comfortably run PlayStation 4 games. One of the ways in which the games industry and PC gaming specifically has changed is that consoles are no longer the best bang-for-your-buck when it comes to gaming performance: Something like the Xbox Series S is sold on low price and high performance, and while the PlayStation 5 is a beast it has a price tag to match. It just makes less sense than ever before. You had to have a PlayStation to play some of the best games being made in the world.Īnd that's a business model that still makes sense. "Only on PlayStation" was the promise, and games like Bloodborne, God of War, Spider-Man and The Last of Us Part 2 delivered. ![]() PS3 was a wobble but PS4 saw Sony once again absolutely smashing Xbox One's face off, and building its strategy on tentpole exclusives like never before. PlayStation 2 built on that success to become the best-selling console ever. Sega never really recovered from it, while Nintendo had to frantically (and successfully) reinvent itself over the decades to come. It's such a part of the landscape now that it's easy to forget how completely Sony upended the games industry in the late '90s, coming out of nowhere to obliterate both of the then-kings of the console space, Sega and Nintendo. No-one who's going to buy an Xbox is going to change that decision because Halo's also on PC. For a while, Xbox tried to 'keep' certain exclusives to the console before realising, for the most part, there wasn't much point. The intention with that console was always to build a PC in a box anyway (as the creator of the original Xbox, Seamus Blackley, will tell you). PC always felt like a more natural home for Xbox, inasmuch as Xbox is part of the wider Microsoft lineage (the name comes from DirectX) and thus always had that PC origin. The kind of game where Sony started selling PlayStation 4s with it as the pack-in game. God of War is one of those games you want to show off to people, something that devours entire evenings by mistake and inspires you into making countless small combat clips. For me, Kratos is Sony's Mario, the most recognisable PlayStation mascot out there and emblematic of the platform's capabilities. There are PlayStation exclusives and then there are PlayStation exclusives.
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