That's obviously not true, is it?
I'm not saying that exclusive games are what's best for the consumer, or anything like that, but taken at face value I think the value proposition here has always been the same. If you're narrowing your prospective audience with something like platform exclusivity, then you need to align the development costs plus development compensation, with the prospective yield from that narrowed market.
So whether or not you can make a AAA game and have it be exclusive, simply depends on whether you're have enough users in that narrowed market and whether you're being sufficiently compensated by the platform holder (or through some other incentive such as being the platform holder and seeing the benefit of hardware sales).
I don't want to make a post that's misunderstood to be some kind of console waring argument, but historically we've had a number of successful platforms and user bases and throughout the years we've seen consoles that have been unsuccessful where exlucivity, or even in some cases, 3rd party support in any form, didn't offer a good value proposition to publishers. I think this is something that Microsoft have struggled with for the past two generations and I think that they require very hefty compensation to third parties to make their platform appealing to consider exclusivity to developers.
But if you're exclusive, with a large userbase then there's no reason why you can't publish games that way, successfully. Nintendo and Sony do and they also court relationships with developers that offer value to those developers too.
I think a lot of this revolves around Final Fantasy 7 rebirth as this sort of case study on why third party multiplatform games don't work, but there are a lot of factors that I think contribute to the declining success of that series. I think the biggest, is that there just isn't a strong precedent for episodic £60 games, which is ultimately what Rebirth is and feels like. If you look at the sales patterns for episodic games something you'll often observe is that there is usually a very steep decline between engagement in the first and second episode. People fall off games. If you look at trophies even within a single game, you'll see that you often loose 40% of consumers very early on into the game, and that's inside of experiences that they've already purchased, where they've already got sunk costs.
For me, I think there's not enough recognition that Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is quite unique in the market and not likely to be representative of market performance for lots of other titles. If you look at other big franchises, even when they're direct sequels, they very rarely feel as though they require users to be engaged with the prior entries as strongly as Final Fantasy does.
Does it feel like you need to play Diablo 3 to play Diablo 4? Yakuza 7 to play 8? GTA4 to Play 5? Uncharted 1 to play 4? Helldivers 1 to play 2? If you look at the landscape, you'll find that these kind of narrative dependencies like in FF7 are actually very uncommon. And games that do have that kind of model tend to be shorter. The Last of Us Part 1 and 2 these are direct sequels of one another, but these are 12-20 hour games. Final Fantasy asks 50-100 hours of its players and understandably a lot of people don't get to the end, and with it feeling like that's required for engagement with the sequel... it's unsurpring that you see shorter sales figures. The only franchise I can think of with quite the same model has been Kingdom Hearts, but they have much lower sales expectations for franchise entire and the releases are much longer apart from one another.
I think for Square it's a lot easier to publically point fingers at a wider market problem than put their hands up and say 'look we misunderstood our product, our audience and our market position and spent too much money on the game'.
The other question is quite what, AAA is and what some publishers seem to want it to be. Since when is $300 million in development the requirement for AAA? I think we have too much emphasis on technical fidelity and not enough on experiential fidelity and something you can see in the industry is that some of the very best games, actually don't have the highest development or technical fidelity, but they have this enormous emphasis on that experiential fidelity.
Baldurs Gate 3 vs Avatar Frontiers of Pandora, for instance. Baldurs Gate has lower surface level technical fidelity but the experiences it offers reflect a much closer understanding of its audience than Avatar Frontiers of Pandora. Pandora has far greater surface level technical fidelity, but that does not make it a better game, or to be frank even a good one in Avatars of Pandora's case. I think this is a challenge or tension that all AAA developers are facing that much of the industry doesn't seem to have a good answer for. But ultimately it comes down to meeting and exceeding consumer expectations in the areas of the game that offer the greatest cost benefit and what we're seeing time and time again is that those areas are more commonly tied to experiential rather than technical fidelity. The systemic design of Baldurs Gate, Helldivers 2 and Breath of the Wild contributes to better player experiences than the graphical offerings in games like Avatar or Hellblade 2.
TLDR: I think we'll find there's still ample room for exclusivity but there are wider problems in the industry around what AAA is that are contirbuting to spiralling development costs with often, minimal returns.
