In the 80s and 90s platforms relied heavily on exclusive games to promote and sell their systems. Sonic for Sega, Mario for Nintendo.. then Sony really ramped up the exclusives with some really big franchise like Gran Turismo and Final Fantasy. And Microsoft tried to compete with exclusives such as Halo and Gears of War.

But now we see a lot of discussions arguing that there shouldn't be exclusives and all games should be available on all platforms. Why?

With Xbox failed as a platform and most indicating the future of the platform will be a change in direction to be a Windows 11 based system, Sony has announced it has pulled plans to port their future exclusives to PC (as this would allow them to run on the next Xbox if it is Windows based, This makes sense to me as a company who wants to control the quality of their titles want to know they are optimised for each fixed platform they are released on.

It's a long standing fact that exclusives do sell systems. Look at Nintendo. They have always enjoyed strong sales because of their own first party titles such as Mario and Zenda, and others such as Pokemon. These games have never been ported and you don't hear that many demanding that they shouldn't be exclusive. Whereas many are currently attacking Sony demanding their games are cross platform? Why should they be?

Do you think games should be exclusive or cross platform?