Money For What? Better Not Be For Nothing.

In this day and age of multiple competing consoles and cross platform gaming I got to thinking - how much longer are companies going to make games exclusive? With sky rocketing development and marketing costs, longer development times, and a narrowing gap in install bases, it just doesn't seem to make much sense. At least to me it doesn't.

Hollywood has definitely influenced this generation of gaming systems. With cinematic and well produced games out there like Uncharted: Drakes Fortune and Mass Effect there comes a price. Actually, the price is what comes with the quality. It takes longer (much, much longer) and requires more resources to make high quality games these days. You need quality people (art, programming, producers, directors), quality equipment, and lots of time. Unfortunately, all three cost money in one way or another. People don't work for peanuts, no matter how much they believe in their game. Development tools also cost money, both the hardware systems and middleware tools and engines. Then there's time itself, just ask 3D Realms how much money they've spent over the past 10 years with Duke Nukem Forever.

Think of the time factor this way: Every day of development is one day later that the product can be on the store shelves, and if the game isn't on the shelf, then there are no profits being made. Games do not make anybody money while they are being developed, and every publisher knows this. Because of the need to push out products, publishers often set deadlines with penalties for not achieving them, go over budget or time and the developers could lose some bonus money. Plus, miss that key holiday season like Christmas and the game may not make any money at all.

Now, that's the basics on how development costs money. So how do exclusives fit into this? An exclusive on one console over another means less potential sales for the title. For example: Console A may have an install base of 40 million while Console B may only have 15 million. Seeing this a game publisher may decide to only sell the game to Console A owners, setting up a console exclusive. Instantly, the publisher loses on the potential to sell the game to an additional 15 million gamers. Even if only 5% of 15 million consumers would buy the game, that's still 750,000 willing to part with their hard earned money. Just to put it in perspective, $60 times 750,000 equals $45,000,000. There would have to be a real good incentive for a publisher or developer to give up on that kind of potential...And I'll have to cover that in tomorrow's post.