When Exclusives Go Bad!!

There’s been a recent bout of Nerd Rage over an Xbox “exclusive” becoming not so exclusive by being ported to the PS3 and thus upsetting people that bought an Xbox 360 purely to play the title!?

Hey, it happens. It’s not the first time and won’t be the last. But I do think it sucks. It really should be made very very clear if a title is going to be truly exclusive or just a timed exclusive and you should only be able to get true exclusivity if you sign a binding contract or something. The title in question is Tales of Vesperia. This (one time) Xbox exclusive is now not only coming out on PS3 but is getting greatly enhanced with added content and features in the process causing Nerd Rage amongst those who bought an Xbox specifically to play what was an exclusive at the time.

I remember feeling a bit ripped off when RE4, which was initially a gamecube exclusive, went to PS2 and got many new features in the process. It could have been worse, I could have based a console buying decision on what platform it was exclusive to but I had both platforms involved. However it was bad enough as this was my favourite game at the time and now I didn’t have the definitive version. Grr! But the Gamecube wasn’t exactly selling like hotcakes so what were they to do?! Well maybe they should have stuck to their word or not got into doing exclusives in the first place??

Situations change but when people buy their consoles, their decisions about which one to buy are often dictated by what exclusives that platform has. I guess unless it’s a first party title anything is possible but it’s tantamount to fraud I say. Especially when you go and make a big deal out of it with the likes of the “Only on Xbox” campaign. They need to clarify, is it only on this platform for the moment or is it only EVER on it?!

Another high profile one to recently have this treatment was Ninja Gaiden 2. In this case they are also adding extra content when porting this “Only on Xbox 360” title to PS3. They will rename the game slightly by adding the traditional “∑” to the title. Maybe this is their way of getting around things on the technicality that’s it’s a (slightly) different game but that’s just flimsy and a poor excuse! If you’re gonna slap a label on something claiming it’s exclusive make sure it really is or don’t do it at all!