Let’s talk about Exclusivity.

What is Exclusivity?

Let’s use the reliable Merriam-Webster dictionary for the definition:

1. the quality or state of being exclusive
2. exclusive rights or services

In the context of the common capitalist culture, exclusivity is when you have something that others don’t, which makes you stand out. Capitalism also makes competition flourish, meaning that end-users will acquire products that contain something different and unique about it, which is what makes it exclusive to this particular brand or company.

There’s a bit of discourse about the recent years of console games or just console hardware in general, and IBM-compatible PCs (which will be referred as PCs for short). These are my thoughts in a critical view about this, meaning that no one will be spared about it.

“No exclusivity is good for you”

I’ve heard that from personal friends and as a general sense over the internet, that everything should be available for PC or for the Switch, or for every platform, because “that way, they can make more money!” A lot of nonsense, as usual.

Exclusivity works as a draw to the platform you’re buying. Consoles do this with standardized hardware pieces, even if their ISA is AMD64 (also known as x86-64 or x64) nowadays. 300, 400, 500 US Dollars won’t get you a computer that does exactly the same thing that a console does at that same price, although it can certainly try (it won’t succeed).

Focusing on a single platform ensures that you’ll spend less money on making it, and less time. Making things multiplatform will carry additional costs and time that sometimes studios can’t do. Not that this will stop people from wanting it, which brings me to the next bit.

I read some discussions somewhere that people want games to be on their platform of choice because of the convenience of playing a game they want to play, and that it’s unfair to them if a cool game isn’t there for them to play. Reading things like this makes me physically cringe, because that’s exactly what this was designed to do. Thisis what exclusivity means, in a nutshell. By trying to force your hand on getting something, they are looking to get you into their platform, thus their ecosystem, and then they can sell other shiny things to you. By making it unfair for you to not get it, they want to make sure you get into their ‘exclusive’ world, which is the whole point.

Good players, Bad players

Now that we established what is the exclusivity, we need to talk about good and bad players of this, because they exist and surely you need to know them. I’ll be using several brands and companies, and explain what is wrong with them.

Xbox

What in the BLEEP is going on with Xbox? Did they all got collective brainrot or something? The only reason why Xbox exists in the first place was to make a Windows box that plays games, but more dedicated to gaming as a whole. Now we get this sentient cloud of pure nothingburgers that are cheapening the brand faster than you can say ‘it’s my turn on the Xbox!’.

Like, I get it, it’s been a rough time, but other companies would be a little more careful with what they do. If it wasn’t for Microsoft’s massive warchest of dollars, Xbox would have folded about a decade ago. Other companies did minor things in comparison and were done with console production for good.

Xbox’s idea of exclusivity doesn’t work because the thing you were meant to sell, the console, has taken a backseat. It’s all about services now, but as many can confirm to you, services can go the enshitification route very quickly, which is in the process of happening, since Microsoft raised prices for Xbox Gamepass. It all goes down downhill from here, since several Xbox exclusives are gonna be made for PlayStation. I mean, why did you buy Zenimax or ABK if you weren’t gonna make the games exclusive to Xbox??? Hello???

I swear, the top managers need to be fired and blacklisted immediately. Oh, and it goes without saying that Xbox is a bad player, because it’s actually quite good at making bad decisions. And speaking of PlayStation…

PlayStation

Sony has continued their victory lap domination over Xbox by making their own exclusive titles work well. Then they decided to expand on PC, in an interesting way. Make a port of the console game to PC several years after the console version’s sales dried up. That was the plan initially, but now it came crashing down because many games are also launching on PC (granted, they are second-party games… in many cases).

The strategy is certainly unique and it helped a bit with getting hype for PC releases, but they did this to make PC owners to get a PS5, clearly. And those that don’t care about PC and already have a PS5 don’t lose anything… So this is a good strategy? What?

If the games themselves are good, that’s another story altogether, but the promise is certainly not bad. This is what I expected Xbox to do (I didn’t expect Sony to bother at all), so it’s surprising to me. I’m not fully convinced that PlayStation is a good player with this but I’d give them more positive points than I’d to Xbox, yeah, good ‘exclusivity’ player.

Nintendo

Like clockwork, Nintendo remains the reason why exclusivity works for game companies. Now, can we stop being hypocrites and agree that Nintendo’s whole thing is the exclusivity? “I own a PC and a Switch”, someone says to me, trying to sway me to the ways that everything should be on everything. “But you have a Switch”, I reply. And they go “That’s just how Nintendo works”. Oh, you mean Nintendo doing the exclusivity bit? You mean Nintendo is doing the thing that Xbox is somehow incapable of doing?

Words sometimes fail me to describe how much I hate this sort of hypocrisy, because “Nintendo can do it” but that’s because they ‘sidestepped’ the console market. No, I’m pretty sure that the Switch is a console, with standardized hardware that can play games made for it. This explanation does not work here, sorry.

Buuut it does mean that Nintendo is the best player in exclusivity. It’s either Nintendo or nothing (not counting emulation). Not sure if I could call this an award but… It works.

Steam

We also have to talk about Valve’s Steam platform. Yes, that’s right, I called it ‘platform’, because it is, like PlayStation or Nintendo consoles. Valve doesn’t make things exclusive (allegedly) and continues to de-empathize exclusivity in a weird way. If you consider the PC Market as a whole, Steam is very small, because it’s plenty of exclusive (ha) games that aren’t there. But for actual reach, yes, Steam is the biggest by far, and where most games are right now.

The issue here is that Steam is PC’s most prominent gaming market, making a good type of consolidation, where all the features can be enjoyed by all of its players. And by adding more and more features, they can ensure that you’re using their platform, not anyone else.

Their exclusivity card works well as an unspoken rule. Yes, you’re don’t need to be locked into Steam if you don’t want to, but if you don’t, you miss out a lot of features as a developer or publisher, and the games are gonna be effectively in a black hole.

What Valve did was something rather funny, a kind of exclusivity that happened organically. Big player in the scene makes things to himself and others to enjoy, people come in and stick around, making big player even bigger, making more things to enjoy, getting more people to come in. Nowadays it’s pretty much a certainty that if you’re not Steam, you’re missing out. As for a player on the exclusivity deal, I think that Steam found a way to make it good for players and developers, and the platform itself, which is why so many ask for this sort of thing.

PC Market

In the other side, you have the entire PC market as a whole. The exclusivity here is just something that people have been hardwired to accept, which is confusing, considering that consoles do the same thing. Wanna play some League of Legends, or Valorant? You must make a Riot Games account and get their launcher, and there’s no other way around it. World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2? You need a Blizzard account and their (horrible) app and again, no way around it.

And there’s not even getting into the OS itself, there’s a vast number, close to 99%, of the games exclusively made for Windows. Sure you can run compatibility layers on Linux to get them to run outside of Windows, but that’s closer to emulation than it isn’t. And there’s ports to MacOS, sure, but certainly these games were first made with Windows in mind and then paid by the OS holders to get them ported in the first place.

And of course, the countless stores you have that sell games, at a discount. Too many to mention, but usually, you only go to the ones that are more reputable or have tons of positive reviews. Overall, it’s a mess.

Epic Games Store

Last one I’ll talk about is EGS, which is the opposite idea behind how to run things when you try to make things exclusive. People don’t mind when a company funds a game themselves to make it an exclusive to a platform, like Nintendo funding Bayonetta 2 and 3. People do take issues when exclusivity is enforced to make something grow in a business sense. This is how EGS started, giving out loads of money to publishers to delay or block a Steam release and get into their platform instead. It’s not an incorrect move or even illegal (it might skirts some laws, maybe), but it’s incredibly amoral and anti-ethical. Just because you have money doesn’t mean you can buy the competition (lol Xbox).

And you know what happened? EGS projected they would take 50% of the addressable market in 5 years, but that only turned into 10% (and I have my doubt on that), which is impressive, but they made all that fuzz about how ‘Steam bad, EGS good’ and nothing good came from it, meaning that the grown they wanted was looking at numbers and not to their end-users. Clearly they could do a better job, but they didn’t, because it wasn’t their focus. And what’s the point of paying companies to delay a Steam release if it’s gonna release on Steam anyway.

They did wise up and did a few other things: Bought studios with popular games on Steam, to make them eventually an exclusive… Which didn’t help them to be seen as the ‘good guy’. And then decided to fund games by making a publishing arm. From the promised games, only one came out, Alan Wake 2, and the game appears to be a financial flop, as EGS hasn’t recovered their financial backing on it. Just… Wild. Bad exclusivity player.

Hate it all you want, this is how it works

Asking for no exclusivity is also asking for no capitalism, because this is how companies compete. Cars have different functions that cater to different people, shoe companies, so on. We don’t need to go far, how many PC manufacturers are out there? And with this new trend of a Handheld Gaming PC, we have Valve, ASUS, Lenovo and plenty of others, fighting for your attention and getting you into their system.

The point is, yes, convenience is good and but unfortunately we need to feel some discomfort to get moving. It’s totally fine and completely natural to not want to do that, but, again, this is how they get you. By making you feel that discomfort, they want to get into their systems, so you can feel comfortable with them.

And it works, otherwise we wouldn’t have consoles still to this day and in the future as well. So, yeah, it might suck, and you might hate it, but it clearly works and it’s here to stay. If you’re a bad exclusivity player, you just back out of the race entirely.