Saturday, May 31, 2008

Kaz Hirai: Sony can 're-evaluate' paying for PS3 exclusives

Kaz Hirai: Sony can 're-evaluate' paying for PS3 exclusivesA long time ago, Jack Tretton mentioned that Sony will not pay for PS3 exclusivity in this generation of games. "We have a very different approach to exclusives than some of our competitors. We don't buy exclusivity. We don't fund development. We don't, for the lack of a better term, bribe somebody to only do a game on our platform," he noted. Instead, Sony tries to seduce developers to make better games on the system, and use the appeal of the PS3 hardware to secure exclusives.

This strategy has meant a bevy of formerly PS2-exclusive series to become multiplatform successes on Xbox 360 and PC. However, Kaz Hirai told ThreeSpeech "that's something that we can re-evaluate." High-profile exclusives act as differentiating reasons for system purchases. PS3 has a strong first-party line-up, but it will need to pursue third-party exclusives with an even stronger bite. However, with games being so expensive in this generation, such a proposal may be difficult. "It's also something that the publishers need to make a business decision on. Ultimately, it becomes a dialogue – if it makes sense for them to go exclusive, that's a business decision that they need to make. But generally speaking, because of the investments that publishers need to make in this round of hardware, it's going to be more difficult for publishers to make that decision."


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