Exclusive Content – Is It Bad For You?

Treating exclusive content like a fatty food and asking if it’s bad for you might seem like a silly thing to do, but really, it’s a question that needs answering. When Adam Boyes stepped out at E3 this year to reveal a slew of exclusive Battlefield: Hardline content, the crowd whooped and cheered. Later that night, the PlayStation crew did it again with Destiny, while earlier, Call of Duty reaffirmed its one-sided relationship with Microsoft at the Xbox conference.

As a gamer in the thick of the moment, you could be forgiven for cheering when your console of choice scored a winner. As a PlayStation gamer at heart, I was happy to hear about the all the Destiny goodies we would be getting – while Xbox owners had to play what would essentially be an incomplete game, until sometime in 2015. It took a moment or two to sink in, but as the cheering died down, you have to wonder – is this really what we want?

Exclusive to Me, Exclusive to You

The gaming industry has always had exclusives. Mario would never step foot on a SEGA system, while Crash Bandicoot ruled the Playstation roost. These days, big hitters like Halo or Uncharted can draw people to a particular system, and in a way, these big name exclusives make the industry fun to watch – how will PlayStation counter Xbox’s Gears of War reveal? Where’s the next LittleBigPlanet? Will I be suckered into buying a Wii U because it’s the only place I can play Smash Bros and Mario Kart?

Exclusives really do matter, especially when each console has a plethora of fantastic titles available on it. So then I ask you – how do you decide on your purchase? Do you go to the console that has the games you want, or do you follow your friends should they unanimously decide elsewhere? Or maybe you can afford them all anyway. The fact is, exclusives aren’t good for anyone, except the companies in charge. Naturally Sony are going to want to keep Uncharted, and by affiliation, Naughty Dog, chained to them, while Microsoft will try to do the same for Halo and 343.

Is it a coincidence that Bungie, who recently broke free from Microsoft’s hold, are now heavily favouring the PlayStation with Destiny? Yes, it’s likely that Sony jumped on them the moment they became independent, but I can imagine Bungie truly want to get their new franchise into the hands of Playstation gamers. By being exclusive, your market is slashed and as a developer, you want people to play your games. As a consumer, you want to be able to play these games – but if you don’t own the required console, you’re out of luck.

Chip off the Old Game

These days however, I feel the winds of change blowing. Yes, exclusive games are still dominant – Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, were two of the biggest games at E3 this year. However, there is a far more insidious trend emerging. Multi-platform titles, such as Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Battlefield: Hardline are breaking off chunks of their games and sprinkling them exclusively among different camps. Take Destiny for example. Want to buy it on Xbox One as that’s the only console you’ve got? Uh-oh.

You see, if you buy it on Playstation, not only will you get into the exclusive alpha, you’ll also receive additional content, including a whole new PvP map and a slew of gear. Who does this help? The developer? The consumer? Sure, if you’ve got a PS4, but not everyone does. No, this helps the companies and nobody else. As consumers, we should be outraged that the so-called ‘multi-platform’ games are taking sides and delivering incomplete experiences. It begs the question – why were people cheering about this at the conferences? Well, there’s only one real answer.

The console wars. As a term, it’s nothing more than hyperbole for the ongoing battle between PlayStation and Xbox (and to a lesser extent, Nintendo) and their respective fans. Yet, it goes ever deeper, chronicling the sales of the machines and their respective exclusives. Owning a machine becomes a matter of pride to some – defending their choice to the bitter end. This is the reason for exclusive content – it’s bait, if you will. The companies at the top are exploiting the console wars. Are they right to do it? Perhaps not, but they’d be mad not to.

The Exclusive Future

All of this, this exclusive content, stems from DLC, or downloadable content, which is another initiative that was welcomed at first, but is now being looked at with scorn as developers reveal DLC for games that aren’t even released yet, or DLC that was purposefully removed from the game to create a bit of extra profit post-release. Exclusive content runs in the same vein. It’s selling gamers incomplete games, to make some extra money off of the fans that care enough to choose a particular machine over the other.

I sense a change coming. As the consoles become more and more homogenous, despite the trivialities like resolution, perhaps their main distinguishing feature is their exclusives. With exclusive content being billed as though the game itself is exclusive, with certain multi-platform titles taking centre stage at E3 shows (Microsoft showed off Assassin’s Creed: Unity and The Division footage before even Ubisoft themselves got the chance this year), this dangerous trend of cutting out content from games and feeding it to hungry gamers after for extra is only going to bloom.

So, back to the fatty foods – is exclusive content good for you? Well, no, not in the slightest. Somewhere, someone is being gipped of content unjustly. What happened to getting complete games guaranteed on release? Exclusive content is bad for the consumer – I’d argue it’s worse than exclusives themselves. At least you sign up to a particular console with prior knowledge of what you’re getting. However, when the multi-platforms come around clearly biased, then you’re stuck. Of course, as the industry grows and grows, so will the need to continually prove your console is different or better than the other. What better way to cut something out of an anticipated game and only give it to one person?

That’s my take, but how do you feel about exclusive content in multi-platform games? Let me know in the comments!

[Cover photo: playertheory.com]