In the final stretch of our 24-hour David Reeves quote marathon, the Sony Europe boss extols the virtues of developer exclusivity over publisher exclusivity – a dying occurrence within a heavily-contested videogame market.
“I think we have to accept that exclusivity is not a thing of the past, but it is probably with publishers,” he stated. “We might do a few things, where we feel that we need a push here or a push there.”
“We have to accept more and more that platform holders themselves cannot have exclusives unless they’re given millions and millions of dollars not to develop a particular game for one particular platform." Or millions of dollars for some exclusive DLC perhaps?
“But for developers, and you could take someone like Quantic Dream for example – a great game, it takes a lot of time to develop," he continued. "They need a little bit of funding, external development. In exchange, it’s exclusive – that works. So exclusivity possibly with developers is more likely that exclusivity with publishers.”
Hopefully Sony will continue to fund high-quality and innovative first or second-party exclusive IPs from here on in – it seems the only way to tie a franchise to any platform these days.