It's 100% cope by ignorant, childish modern PC players, and dumbarse Xbox fanboys, that bears no resemblance to the reality of what consoels sell well and what we have been told is the reason exclusives exist in times gone past.
Even going back to the NES vs Master System, it was Mario and Sonic that were the most obvious reasons to own one system over the other. Platform holders invested in exclusives, be they first, second or third party, to distinguish themselves from the competition.
There are more examples of this pushing otherwise old or lacking hardware over competitors than you can shake a stick at. The first and most infamous would be Tetris on the Gameboy, followed by Pokémon, both of which catapulted an 'outdated at launch' brick to be one of the most successful handhelds of all time.
Even the oft cited lack of first party exclusives on PS1 and PS2 is a complete fabrication.
PS1 launched in with Wipeout, one of the most influential and popular games of it's generation, and a game that laid the groundwork for PlayStation's continued success in Europ to this day.
What's more, the idea you can dismiss the third party exclusives it had as if that doesn't count is obvious cope. The N64 and Saturn did not have MGS, FF, or most Tomb Raiders. Playstation may have got those exclusives by making deals and providing a better environment for third parties, but that still meant it's success was based on exclusives.
Going into recent history with 7th gen, which really laid the groundwork for today, both Playstation and Nintendo's successes here are directly due to exclusives.
The Wii sold to that blue ocean new audience due to Wii Sports. That pack in game was arguably the most important in their history, and once the console was in homes, it was exclusives that kept business going. To argue Mario Kart isn't a game that sells hardware units is retardery of the highest order.
The PS3 too turned things around with exclusives. Infamous , Uncharted and Journey in particular gave Playstation the reputation they currently rely upon as masters of the cinematic game. While multiplats performed poorly on the system, the first party line up had so many 'unmissable' exclusives that sales shot up and quickly began to catch up to the 360, a system that itself had its fair share of exclusives, but relied far more heavily on multiplatform games, especially in the second half of the generation.
In fact I'd argue this is the first piece of evidence we have agains platform agnosticism.
The 360 initially, like the X1 before it, relied heavily on PC ports other consoles struggled with, because almost no one was gaming on PC at the time. PC was just not a competitor in the casual gaming market at the time, only really starting to pick up a growing market share after Steam started selling third party software in late 2005, half a year
after the 360 launched.
For the early years of 7th gen, PC gaming just wasn't a factor in where the vast majority of gamers were choosing to play, making PC ports on the 360 exclusives by default to most people.
It's hard to overstate just how massive a sea change Steam was in the gaming space. It took a few years to really catch on, buoyed by its legendary sale events, but by the end of 7th gen it had become the defacto front for PC gaming and established the platform as a true competitor to consoles. PC releases went from a niche for rich nerds to a genuinely easy to utilise and safe to invest in option for the majority.
Suddenly those PC game ports to the 360 were not the only realistic way to play those games, but suddenly the inferior and more expensive option.
And so, having lost its effective exclusives and having neglected its first party games chasing the Kinect fad, Xbox tarnished its reputation and began to die.
8th gen saw these divergent paths solidify further. PS4 had its amazing library of exclusives to make choosing it over the XO a safe bet, even during the heady days of misinformation over which console would truly be the stronger and have better third party support. People genuinely expected the XO to be follow the 360 on that front, despite assurances from Playstation that they had fixed this (which they had), but it didn't matter.
People were willing to invest in a PS4 because of the reputation for first party exclusives the brand had earned with the PS3.
Xbox then flailed in panic as their market share tanked. They'd mismanaged their exclusives so much even Halo had become a joke and so they tried leaning on the fact they were a department of MS, and tried to drum up good publicity and additional revenue by sacrificing their underperforming and poorly regarded first party exclusivity.
And it did not help them. Sales have only continued to accelerate in falling, and losses continue to mount. They've even stopped advertising the XSS/X in Europe, so irrelevant have they become there.
Nintendo meanwhile, well yes, the WiiU was a clusterfuck. But the games still sold well. Infact many of the better games on the system outsold their contemporaries on the other consoles. If you knew what a WiiU was, you bought the exclusives.
The trouble was, most didn't know what it was.
But then, alongside the other mid gen refreshes, the Switch was released, and blew the barn doors off, in no small part due to Breath of the Wild, which may have been the most hotly anticipated game of my lifetime, and it's gone on to sell 40M units, on a console that is literally just an out of date tablet with a couple of controls bolted to the side, and was that way since day one.
So we have Xbox as the first piece of evidence. Terrible exclusives coinciding with declining sales, before going multiplatform and those sales getting even worse, with the company circling the drain, likely going third party at best, getting shut down entirely at worst.
The second bit of evidence is Nintendo. It has stuck with traditional exclusives, and continued to see success. Even in the dark days of the WiiU, their exclusives moved hardware when they released, and managed to avoid the consistent losses Xbox has seen. Today they're a generation behind the Xbox and Playstation on the hardware front, but consistently ourself them both, and make a healthy profit.
Then there's Playstation. The company that saved the PS3 with its exclusives. That gained a reputation for great, creative, and widely appealing titles with the PS4, a console that could have rivalled the PS2 if it hadn't dropped off so hard towards the end of its life, when they copied Xbox and began porting to PC.
Suddenly the number of exclusives declined. They changed from only needing 1 in 4 games to make a profit (stated by Shuhei Yoshida on multiple occasions), to needing to abandon smaller games, make dryer everything was as safe and inoffensive as possible, and go all in on AAA and live services to make sure every game made a profit.
And what was the result? PS5 sales have fallen behind PS4. Profits are sagging massively, people are not moving on to current gen hardware like they should do, and games like Concord are trying so hard to appeal to a wide audience, going insanely politically correct and chasing whatever the big trend was popular with Multiplats at the time development began, that they've lost all personality and appeal.
Playstation simply is not in any way arguably evidence that abandoning exclusives improves sales or profits. It's evidence against.
So yes, sorry for the essay again, but I wanted to really paint a picture on how bloody stupid an argument going multiplatform doesn't hurt a platform holder or their games actually is.
It should be obvious, but as
@HE1NZ demonstrates, some people are doggedly refusing to accept that they're wrong, even as 2/3 consoles demonstrate that the bleeding obvious to anyone with half a brain was infact just as bad of an idea as it clearly was from day one.
But I think some people just want everything on PC so badly they're either prepared to see quality and quantity drop to get it, or just won't let themselves admit they're selfish little pricks, that don't care that they're harming their hobby and making games worse.
