Metal Gear Solid 4 last of the great 3rd-party exclusives?
The days they are a-changin’. It looks like Metal Gear Solid 4 will have to sell over 1 million copies on it’s first day(!) in order for Konami to make back the sky high development costs of the sure-to-be system-seller. This is all due to it only being available on one platform, the Playstation 3.
It used to be that video game developers could bank on a system exclusive to ramp up sales numbers for that title, but no longer. In this day and age it can take years and millions upon millions of dollars with huge development teams just to pump out one “next-gen” quality video game title (particularly on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360), and a new Reuters article explores whether or not Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots may indeed be the last great console exclusive (although maybe they are forgetting about a little game called Final Fantasy XIII).
As has been widely reported, virtually all Sony’s once-exclusive juggernauts like Devil May Cry 4, Virtua Fighter 5, Grand Theft Auto 4, Assassin’s Creed, and Mercenaries 2 have gone multiplatform with all of them releasing on Microsoft’s competing console as well as Sony’s.
“We understand publishers are needing to recoup their investment,” said Peter Dille, senior vice president of marketing for Sony. “From our perspective, as long as the games aren’t going exclusive to other platforms, PS3 gamers are not actually losing anything.”
To compete Sony has majorly ramped up production with it’s own internal studios and is now creating no less than 15 Playstation titles, which is more than Microsoft and Nintendo combined (according to them anyway) with 15 exclusives hitting the PS3 between September 2007 and April 2008.
And now 3rd parties are needed to move massive amounts of copies in the first DAY just to stay afloat.
Which is a high order for Metal Gear Solid 4 considering that PS3 sales have been sluggish when compared to the Xbox 360 (7.2 million units sold) and Wii (5.2 million sold). The PS3 has sold only 2 million to this point according to NPD research and a year after it’s release only two PS3 titles have reached the one million mark in sales
So with production costs being anywhere from $10 to $50 million for top titles, that means publishers are virtually required to go multiplatform to make back all that money spent.
“You might be able to weather one title coming in at 500,000 in sales,” said Pidgeon. “But two or three failures like that and even big publishers are going to be hurting.”
This isn’t looking good for Sony and Konami. I’m really frustrated that Microsoft had to sneak in early with the 360, they came in at the right time and with the right hardware in order to force the PS3 into a corner.
Argh.
