Shane Henry of Level Complete explains why exclusivity is a love/hate situation in gaming today
"Hammerwatch II's journey to Xbox has been long and perilous. After first launching on Steam in the fall of 2023, the game finally turned up on PlayStation 5 last December. Since then, Xbox gamers who enjoyed the original Hammerwatch and the sublime Heroes of Hammerwatch have been anxiously awaiting their turn at the long-promised sequel. At last, the wait is nearly over because Hammerwatch II will hit Xbox and PlayStation 4 on April 23," says Co-Optimus.
Joe 'Three Sheets' Neate (Executive Producer): "As I’m sure you can imagine, when it comes to Sea of Thieves my days are full of numbers. Development costs, active servers, days until the next update… Sometimes, though, a truly extraordinary number stands out – a number like 40 million, which I’m incredibly pleased to say is the number of pirates who’ve now set sail in Sea of Thieves!"
Garrr... more people to walk the plank and send to Davey Jones locker.
would have been funny to release this on talk like a pirate day.
40 million have set sail...that's great. How many are sailing now? Monthly active users....when it actually matters. How many people purchased the game is another important number.
You don't get numbers like that from MS mouth pieces, they just like to say stuff like "this game was looked at 129 million time, the biggest amount of people browsing a game of this genre on xbox gamepass ever in the last 3 weeks compared to before gamepass was out (small print only 2 million bothered playing longer than 20 seconds and only 100 people are playing it concurrently)
It's all smoke and mirrors
There are usually around 10,000 concurrent users on Steam not counting Xbox or PS but really it doesn't matter as long as there are enough people on the servers to play which there always were and will be for a long time now with the PS players coming on board. Same goes for how many people bought it and how many are on GP, we aren't the accountants of these console companies so why would we care?
Reporting on MAU stats is very misleading. Other companies publish units sold, MS cannot or will not due to Game Pass. We all know that their prior startegies have not panned out so now they have to actually sell games on other consoles. In any case, SoT is doing impressive preorders on PS5 and will very likely motivate Satya to release more games other than the four indicated games on their competitor's consoles. Take note Phil is radio silent....
40 Mil across Stream, Windows 10, and Xbox. Healthy numbers for sure, but when PC is the biggest platform, I expected more. It’ll be interesting to see how it does on PlayStation. Very well could be double that player count in 6 months with PS too. It’s crazy for developers to skip the most popular platform, not sure why they’d want to, but they must have had their rea$ons.
Devstream 178 was filled with so many cool announcements for the game's community, and were able to ask a lot of questions about Warframe: 1999 and more!
When it uses the actual assets of a system, rather than a gimmick, yes. An Exclusive can mean something.
Thing is no one - meaning 3rd party devs - have really bothered trying to exploit a console's hardware since the PS1.
Depends on the game. Exclusives like Halo, InFamous and Mario? Very significant.
Exclusives like Blinx, Haze and Steel Diver? Not so much.
They really do not matter at this point in the game. It's all about the console allegiances.
If Halo was on the playstation, the same people that tout Killzone now and bash Halo, would bash Killzone and tout Halo. Vice Versa
If Mario was on the Xbox and God of War was on the Wii-u, God of War would get trashed and Mario would get praised.
If The Last of Us was a Wii-u exclusive and Pikmin was on the ps3, the same ps3 crowd would praise the ps3 for the diversity and bash The Last Of Us as just another Zombie game.
It is what it is these days.
PC pretty much outclasses consoles in every way.Exclusives are all consoles have going for them so of course they matter,even in that catagory PC is pretty much equal to consoles when it comes to exclusives.
Well, I consider myself a pretty average demographic, and they certainly matter to me.
It definitely gives each platform their respective advantages.
Like, I'm sure Sony fans would have loved Halo or Gears, and Microsoft fans would have loved The Last of Us or LittleBigPlanet.
The problem with all games being cross platform is when there's such a massive audience, developers tend to be less driven to create something truly great. When they have a limited audience, they have to release something epic to absolutely sell their game to the platform consumers.
I like the idea of exclusives. It's good for competition.