Xbox 360 V PS3 Exclusive warfare

Watching N4G comments and news articles over the first two or three months of this and the past year there seems to be a trend developing. The News articles written in December and January, traditionally a slow two months for video game releases, are usually filled with Game of the year and speculation articles about the next year. A lot of console X or console Y dominated the year articles are now increasing. Games that are coming in the next year are touted to be better than the games on a rival console and arguments ensue.

Microsoft seems to have adopted a policy since E3 07 of not talking about games unless they are six months away. Peter Moore said this on stage, all the games that he showed were going to be on game store shelves by Christmas, and he wasn't lying. This policy has continued ever since for Microsoft. The reveals of the past can't be erased, as evidenced by the continual no-show of Alan Wake. It does seem that they are trying to keep games in development hidden until the game is six months from release. This policy is good in a way. No vapor ware games being shown and eagerly awaited stroke hyped to oblivion before release, no disappointment if a game is delayed.

The negative side to this is that Sony continue to carry on the policy of a large majority of the gaming sector and hype products that are little more than preliminary renders or concept art. Now this isn't a swipe a Sony. The industry as a whole does this. If your product only gets released once a year it pays to keep your company in the public eye by showing preliminary work on your game before release. Good internet and word of mouth buzz on a product is the difference between say Littlebigplanet and Too human. The latter having such a shocking cloud of negativity attached that a reasonably good game was totally sunk. Whereas Littlebigplanet had a long time in the public eye before release but almost all the press was positive.

With this in mind looking at the exclusive slate for the Xbox360 for 2009 the cupboard seems bare. Alan Wake might come, there is the Halo Wars and the Halo 3 expansion. Whereas Sony have been carrying on releasing tidbits about many of the games they have in production. Infamous, Heavy Rain, MAG, God of War 3 Uncharted 2 Gran Turismo 5 etc. None of these games has a release date most of them will come out in late 2009 and more than likely a few will release in 2010. I would be prepared to put money on God of War 3, MAG and Gran Turisimo 5 not coming this year. Infamous, Uncharted 2 and Heavy Rain I think we will see mid year or around the November Frenzy of releases.

So taking away the uncertainties of the future, how do past exclusive releases stack up?
I have taken a list of 21 games exclusive to each console. Looked up metacritic and vgchartz for sales and scores figures.

This list is not meant to be complete, it's 21 games chosen mainly by looking at my own games collection. I decided to limit it to the same amount of games for both consoles and any missing games you may think of, like Tales of Vesperia, Star Ocean 4, Socom etc are missing simply because I live in the UK and those games are not released here yet. I have listed only games for the Xbox 360 that are at time of writing exclusive to the console. I could have added in Gears of war 1, Mass effect and Left 4 dead, which have PC versions as well, but I have decided to go purely with titles that are only available on the Xbox360 for it's list. Which probably hobbles it's scores quite a lot, however this is platform exclusivity we are arguing about here and Microsoft have shot themselves in the foot in this area by releasing PC versions of most of their games.


PS3 only games
Little Big Planet 95 2.02m
Killzone 2 91 N/A
Metal Gear Solid 4 94 3.88m
Resistance Fall of Man 86 3.54m
Resistance 2 87 1.44m
Ratchet and Clank Future 89 1.61m
Valkyria Chronicles 87 0.35m
Ninja Gaiden Sigma 88 0.39m
Gran Tourismo 5 Prologue 80 2.94m
Everybody's Golf World Tour 81 0.70m
Uncharted Drakes Fortune 88 2.60m
Motorstorm 82 3.83m
Motorstorm : Pacific Rift 81 0.79m
Warhawk 84 0.49m
Heavenly sword 79 1.41m
Ridge Racer 7 78 0.65m
Folklore 75 0.20m
Eye of Judgement 75 0.27m
Disgaea 78 0.21m
Lair 53 0.41m
Haze 55 0.67m

1706 out of 2100 = 81.2%
28.4m total sales

Xbox 360 only games
Halo 3 94 9.13m
Gears of War 2 93 4.62m
Forza Motorsport 2 90 4.38m
Fable 2 89 2.60m
Project Gotham 4 85 1.77m
Project Gotham 3 88 1.52m
Halo Wars 82 N/A
Saints Row 81 2.80m
Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts 80 0.55m
Viva Pinata : Trouble in Paradise 82 0.36m
Crackdown 83 1.54m
Ninja Gaiden 2 81 1.00m
Perfect dark zero 81 1.47m
Lost Odyssey 78 0.91m
Amped 3 72 0.14m
Kameo 79 0.74m
Blue Dragon 79 0.62m
Infinite Undiscovery 68 0.46m
Too human 65 0.58m
Viva Pinata: Party Animals 56 0.31m
Bullet Witch 55 0.10m

1661 out of 2100 = 79.0%
35.6m sales

Now, how can we spin these figures, lets have a go for each console.

PS3
21 PS3 exclusives have sold 28.4 million copies, with an install base of only 20 million. These 21 games have a combined score of 81.2% on metacritic. 13 games have scored above 80% on metacritic. Three games score more than 90% making them AAA games. PS3 exclusives score higher on metacritic than Xbox360 comparable games.

Xbox 360
21 Xbox360 exclusives have sold 35.5 million copies. These games have a combined score of 79% on metacritic and 13 of them score 80% and above. Three games score more than 90% making them AAA games. Xbox 360 exclusives have sold 7.2 million more than comparable PS3 exclusives.

As an aside to doing this research for this blog post I also came across 23 games for the xbox 360 that are multi platform but not available on PS3. They are:-

Mass Effect
Gears of War
Left 4 dead
The Last Remnant
Shadowrun
Viva Pinata
Hitman : Blood money
Far cry instincts Predator
Condemned
Prey
Lord of the rings : Battle for middle Earth
Just Cause
Tomb raider legend
Dead Rising
Rockstar table tennis
The Godfather
Battlefield 2 : Modern Combat
Superman Returns
Two worlds
Call of Duty 2
Quake 4
Eragon
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter

Where does this leave us? I'll tell you where, right back where we started with a huge swathe of time wasted that I could have spent playing games. They both are fairly equal, sales are slightly higher for the Xbox360 scores slightly higher for the PS3. Nobody is winning apart from the people that make the games and have seen a combined income from 64 million game sales. $3,840 million dollars if you take $60 as the unit price. Wow that is a lot of money, do you really think the people in the offices at Sony and Microsoft need you to argue their case and business strategy? It's time to just buy all the consoles, Wii, Xbox360 and PS3 and just play the games that you like on all platforms.

It doesn't matter if someone who can barely rub two words together and is 10 year old come onto a games forum and spouts utter rubbish about the console of your choice. It really does not matter, look at the evidence above, both the software developers and platform holders are making a huge amount of money out of you. They don't care how much we gamers squabble amongst ourselves. Let's just stop fighting and talk about the games.

It's a common tactic when an article has sensational content designed to make flame wars to say that it's only written for hits. Where do you think the console war has got N4G. How many hits and cash does N4G get out of fanning the console war. How much advertising revenue is made from keeping all this going. The gamer zone is meant to be policed to keep the console war out. Is it? The stupid articles are repeatedly passed, the blogs keep coming. Hell here's one right here :-)