Video Game exclusivity is stupid and it hurts everyone (even you)

I was recently recommended a game called Shinsekai: Into the Depths by a kind soul on Mastodon and, as I always do, I hopped into the Steam app to add it to my wishlist. What I found there left my eyes rolling around like pool balls and my distended jaw on the table like some kind of fucked up cartoon character: the game isn’t available on Steam but the soundtrack is available to buy if I want it. After some poking around, I found that it’s a Switch and iOS exclusive. I couldn’t restrain myself after that and I flipped the table.

This is probably the most egregious (and offensive) example of exclusivity I’ve run into, aside from any game that’s exclusive to the Epic Games Store. (More on that in a minute!) There is no part of my brain that can comprehend a publisher releasing a game on the Switch and deciding against releasing it on Steam.

Now, I haven’t tried to keep it a secret that I’m not a game developer. I’m a whiny consumer like most gamers out there. I have no basis upon which I could be an armchair developer/publisher. But I have Google at arm’s reach like everyone else, so I know what the first cause of exclusivity could possibly be:

Problem #1: Listing fees, or paying companies to do basically nothing

Even my tiny monkey brain can understand the differences between service charges on the different platforms. Some indie developers may not be able to afford the $100 listing fee and the 30% tax that Steam takes from each sale. But, Apple appears to charge $100 to publish apps on their store, too? So what gives? I guess someone may not be able to shell out a Benjamin to both Valve and Apple…

In this case, putting the game on the Switch store makes sense: they seem to have no listing fee at all. It’s no wonder then that the Switch is considered an indie publisher/player’s wet dream. If there is no barrier for entry, then it’s a no brainer to put a game on that store. That kills me a little as an indie lover – Steam used to be considered the home for indie games back when they accepted games via the (hugely flawed) Greenlight program instead of charging to host them. Of course, that means that the Switch has a huge shovelware problem like Steam used to. (It still does, but it used to, too.)

But, to go back to the game that brought this post about: Shinsekai: Into the Depths is published by fucking Capcom for christ’s sake! I know they have $100 to put the game on Steam because I just gave them more than that for Resident Evil 4 and a shitload of Megaman games last month. Maybe they have some kind of exclusivity agreement with Apple and Nintendo? Who knows? What I do know is that that brings me to the second head of the hydra that is exclusivity,

Problem #2: Exclusivity agreements (that screw over a majority of potential buyers)

I told you we’d come back to Epic Games.

Epic Games opened a PC storefront out of nowhere a few years ago. Their main purpose in this world is to make life harder for people who are invested in the Steam ecosystem, from what I can tell. Where Valve takes a 30% cut from all game sales on Steam, Epic Games only takes 12%. That sounds great… on the surface. In reality, this baits developers and publishers into putting their games on the Epic store, where they are coerced into signing exclusivity contracts to keep their games off of Steam. This sounds like a sweet deal for game makers, until someone (like me, right now) points out that Epic Games only has about half the active monthly users that Steam does. So, these exclusivity deals are usually only for a specified length of time – otherwise, the devs and publishers would never reach the number of sales that they could on the Steam store.

What actually happens when Epic Games Store has exclusive rights to a game is something like this: Slanderoid watches as the world plays Final Fantasy VII: Remake when it’s released on PlayStation. Slanderoid knows that it will eventually come to PC because all of the other Final Fantasy games have. Slanderoid sees that FFVII: Remake gets announced on PC!… as an Epic Games exclusive. Slanderoid waits another six months before the game is released on Steam. Slanderoid buys the game at a massive discount on day one. So, in the end: the developer didn’t sell the game to me until 18 months after the original release date and, when they finally did, it was at a discounted price that Valve took a 30% cut from. If I could have bought it at full price on day one, I would have. It’s like they don’t even want my money.

And Epic isn’t going to attract the number of gamers that Steam does. I happened to see that Epic has 1,600 games for sale in their store – Steam has at least 50,000. (Of course, that includes a lot of games that should be courtesy flushed, but some of them are pretty good, I think.) On top of that, Epic doesn’t provide half of the things that the Steam does for their users. Sure, the community reviews are written by idiots who don’t know what they’re doing (like myself), and nobody uses the broadcast feature because why would they when Twitch exists, and user profile pages can end up looking like the ghost of a tween’s MySpace page still haunting the internet. But those features exist. And, while I’m not Valve’s accountant, I’m betting that part of that 30% cut from game sales I mentioned before goes toward maintaining those features.

Of course, those “features” can come and bite consumers in the ass, too. For your consideration, I present to you:

Problem #3: Hardware manufacturers think they their shit doesn’t stink

Nintendo claims that keeping their IPs on their own brand of hardware to serve up a “hardware and software integrated gaming experience”. So, by that logic, they want their games to be integrated with Joy-Con drift and controllers that are so small that I can feel the joints in my fingers disintegrating when I play with them? Do you have any desire to play Tears of the Kingdom in VR? Then get out your official Nintendo cardboard piece-of-shit “VR headset” and play until you get a migraine from the wretched screen resolution of the Switch. They apparently have no interest in developing a true VR headset or allowing players to use one of their own, so their customers better not be interested either.

Nintendo is the worst of the worst when it comes to savoring their own farts, but Sony isn’t a whole lot better. A PlayStation is a console that is basically a PC but with plenty of the crap that comes with PC gaming and very few of the benefits? I guess Sony people can upgrade the hard drive in the PS5, so that’s something. That comes in handy when games get constant updates and streams of DLC. Oh, yeah! There’s the inclusion of an SSD in the PS5!… Something I had in my PC years before Sony got their heads out of their asses.

And this behavior isn’t just greedy – it’s destructive, too. Thanks mostly to consoles with walled gardens that contain exclusive games, up to 87% of the classic games are nearly unable to be found anywhere without resorting to piracy.

These same companies that won’t allow their games to be played on other hardware will also go to bizarre lengths to make sure that players don’t take matters into their own hands. The list of crazy shit Nintendo has done to its own fans to “protect” their IPs from people that are often just expressing their love for their franchises is too long to go through here… but you can see a list that someone already made right here. This behavior is, in fact, part of the reason that I’ve only bought two or three games on the Switch in the last five years. The things they have done are abhorrent and I refuse to support a company like that.

Whew! That got heavy for a second, huh? I think it might be time to lighten the mood a little bit.

BOOBS! FARTS! WEINERS! BUTTS!

Hehehe… That monkey thinks it’s a clown 😂

Okay, that’s a little better.

This problem has grown into such a strange, pervasive beast that, now that Sony is putting games on PC, fans of the company are angry that Sony is offering their formerly exclusive games to PC gamers via Steam. From my perspective, they’ve been taught to want access to games to be restricted. This used to be a lucrative thing for console companies to do but, now, the opposite is true. And, now that Sony is trying to pivot, it’s finding that it’s hard to get fans to pivot with them. They played themselves.

I know I haven’t mentioned Microsoft or Xbox in any of this, but that’s mostly because they are the wimpiest company when it comes to exclusives. They know this, too. That’s why they recently purchased Activision Blizzard (and King). Their tactic is different than the rest of the console companies, but it’s no less of a rim job than what the other companies do. This has become a habit for Microsoft: buy a developer for its exclusive IPs, watch the developer flounder after the acquisition, and then waste the developers’ talent on pursuing whims that rarely pay off. Microsoft may be cooler about releasing games on multiple platforms, but the number of development companies that wither away under their ownership has probably prevented brand new classics from being developed.

Conclusion

So, yeah. Game exclusivity might sound good to the player who prefers consoles. Why wouldn’t it? When we choose our platform of choice, we become a part of a club that’s way cooler than all the other clubs. Everyone likes to feel cool. But the long-term effects of this particular type of coolness have the potential to be devastating to the artform.

We, as buyers of video games, get the shaft when it comes to exclusivity. Our options are pretty limited as far as actions go. (Bah! Foiled by capitalism again!) But, we can always speak with our wallets. If a company does stuff we don’t like, we can avoid giving them our money.

If you take one thing away from this post, let it be this: it is always morally correct to emulate and backup video games. If preservation is left up to the console manufacturers, most of the history of the artform will be abandoned and lost to the sands of time.

…Oh, there’s one more thing to remember about exclusivity: it would be great if folks weren’t douches about their platform of choice. They are all awesome and sucky in equal measure. We just all prefer different flavors of awesome suckiness.

Sources:

https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/news/epic-games-store-2023-year-in-review#:~:text=There%20are%20now%20over%20270,up%20from%20last%20year’s%2068M.

https://www.demandsage.com/steam-statistics/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20latest%20data,monthly%20active%20users%20on%20Steam.

https://gdevelop.io/page/how-to-publish-your-game-on-steam-and-why-you-should

https://www.sphinx-solution.com/blog/cost-to-put-an-app-on-the-app-store/

https://developer.nintendo.com/faq

https://gamerant.com/epic-games-store-features-steam-gog-library/

https://www.vg247.com/nintendo-says-mobile-will-not-be-the-primary-path-of-future-games-starring-mario

https://www.geekwire.com/2023/researchers-find-87-of-u-s-classic-video-games-are-out-of-print-and-critically-endangered/

https://www.thegamer.com/a-snapshot-of-nintendos-convoluted-legal-history/

https://gamerant.com/ghost-of-tsushima-pc-port-backlash-why/

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/13/23791235/microsoft-activision-blizzard-acquisition-complete-finalized