Exclusives or cross platform?

[Harrison]

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?

[Tiago]

I dont mind.
I have so many games in a waiting list that i will have games tobplay for the next 12 months.
Half of them i already bought them, the other half just waiting to the price goes down.
This days i am a total fun of Steam, and most of my games are indie or older games. Since i have a laptop, i play next to my wife in living room so we could be close, she is watching something on tv or reading and i am playing so i must be a laptop, she would kill me if i take a desktop to the living room. So and as a laptop, it is not a top power system, so i can only play games with 3 or more years or less demanding games. The steam catalogue is so big that i dont care much about games exclusive from other systems.

[Harrison]

Steam is great that is very true. Have you considered a Steam Deck? I tend to play that when I'm sitting with my wife and she's watching something I'm not that interested in,

However I do get conflicted, especially for older games, to buy a game on Steam or GOG. Mostly because GOG fixes older games so they run well on current versions of Windows and hardware and they are DRM free and you download the whole package. But equally Steam versions install with no extra hassle on Steam Deck so I have easy access to the same game on PC and handheld. But it's not too hard to get GOG games running on the Steam Deck with the Heroic Games Launcher. Can also run Xbox cloud gaming on the Steam Deck, and whilst I've not tried it you are meant to be able to get remove PS5 play running too.

As for waiting lists, it's the problem we all have! So many games come up on special offers and discounts or something like Humble Bundle, and the number in my Steam library just keeps expanding and I keep forgetting about games that looked interesting and I was going to play next. I have however decided this year to pick a game and play it to completion before starting another. Otherwise I just end up with loads of partly played games.

[Tiago]

I also have a gog account, but i love steam, its better to track game updades and news.
And i did notice several times that steam receive more updates and patches then gog.
Steam deck last time i saw was expensive. I think it looks amazing, and great for a lotnof games, but games like fps or anything that uses mouse a lot, i dont know but i am afraid. One of the last games i love was satisfactory and i cant imagine playing that with anything then a mouse. But sure for so many other games is great.

[Harrison]

The Steam Deck has 2 trackpads (One each side) that you can use for mouse control, but also the touch screen. A lot of games auto switch to the controller layout though, just as they do when you have an Xbox controller connected to a PC. But there something that actually makes FPS games better. Gyroscopic control. This is part of other handhelds like Switch but because you can run any PC FPS on the Steam Deck it works with them all. Valve updated Half Life 2 to take full advantage of this for the Steam Deck release. The right analogue thumbstick is touch sensitive. If you configure a game to use Gyro for aiming in game and you have your finger on the right thumbstick gyro movement takes over, so you can use your left analogue stick to move around, but move the actual Steam Deck around to aim. This is very accurate and brilliant for sniper shots. And with Steam Deck you can manually configure the layout for every game so I've used gyro aiming in every FPS including Quake 2 and Star Wars Dark Forces. It works very nicely.

[Tiago]

Hum... i must go read more and watch some videos about it.