NeoGAF – what counts as an "exclusive" to you?

What counts as an exclusive to YOU?

  • Only on the ONE system

  • On one console + PC/mobile

  • On multiple consoles within the same family (PS4/PS5, Switch/Switch 2)

Results are only viewable after voting.
An exclusive is something you can only experience on hardware platform

If a game exists on PC - the game already has a better version and is NOT exclusve

Zelda TOTK is exlusive to Nintendo Switch (1/2) etc

So Uncharted 4 , Halo Infinite is not exclusive, neither is TLOU1/2 - they have better versions on PC
 
Baemono said:
You mean like this game ?

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There are certainly examples to be found through the decades, but I believe you follow the point made.
 
Only on one console or only on PC but I also believe in timed exclusivity. I think that is probably the best for everyone since it still supports a platform but does not play keep away forever for others.
 
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Only on a single console. If a PlayStation game releases on Steam, exclusivity is broken, and the game is multiplatform. I don't really know why Sony doesn't consider Steam/Windows to be a rival platform at this point.
 
All options make sense depending on how you want to refer to the game, but what really matters to value a hardware is being 100% exclusive to it, so that's what matters to me.
 
Humdinger said:
People use it in two different ways: "platform exclusive" (appears on only a single platform) or "console exclusive" (appears only on a single console).

I use it to mean the latter, "console exclusive." That's because I am a console player. I am accustomed to decades of console wars focused on lists of console exclusives. In that context, whether something appears on PC is not particularly relevant. It's about which games are exclusive to one console rather than the other. I acknowledge that "platform exclusive" is a reasonable way to think about "exclusives," but I think of exclusives in terms of console exclusivity.
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Indeed, as a PC player, the point is reinforced by the fact that technically nothing is exclusive if PC port disqualifies it. Sure, there might not be LEGAL ports of a certain console game, but PC gamers never really cared about that.

I still remember a decade ago, when an old colleague asked me where to get Pokemon games that run on PC. I never played any of them myself, but was able to research enough in half and hour to send the right files to her to play the original Pokemon Red and Blue.

Console gamers being upset that PC ports exist of their console titles is overblowing it. Other than the crazy PS3 Cell that makes the porting a nightmare, PC gamers never had to deal with exclusivity if they really don't want to.
 
Buggy Loop said:
#3

Zelda BOTW is an exclusive, its also on Wii U and Switch 🤷‍♂️ Can't believe its voted so low.
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Switch/Wii U games legitimately benefit from the very simple fact that functionally no one owned a Wii U, so for the bulk of the audience those games may as well have been exclusive. Fewer than 10% of Switch owners even had a Wii U – think about that, in any group of 10 Switch owners, it's not even a guarantee you find one person who owned a Wii U, that's how little that system sold. And then the pool for people who owned a Wii U and may also have bought the game on it is even lower, because most software sold only a fraction of the Wii U's already low sales.

Put simply, while, yes, there is a group of very committed hardcore Nintendo fans out there who owned a Wii U, and for whom BOTW, MK8, or Mario 3D World wasn't exclusive, for almost everyone else, including people making the decision to buy a console to play either BOTW or MK8 in 2017, they basically were. If you were going to spend a few hundred bucks to be able to play BOTW or MK8 in 2017, were you going to do it on the Wii U, which was doomed and already discontinued before its successor even hit the market, or the Switch, whose future may have been uncertain at the time, but at least it had a chance at success?
 
Voted one system before I realized the third option was talking about 'families'.

A game is exclusive when it's available to either PC, Playstation, Nintendo or Xbox.

But there might be exclusivity within each 'family', ie Demon's Souls Remake or Bloodborne.
 
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In my view there are two types:

1) When a game is only available on one platform.
2) When a game's best version (or a specific version) is only available on one platform.

For number 2, I consider Crysis and to a lesser degree, Cyberpunk, to be PC exclusives. I know that they are available on other platforms, but anyone and everyone will tell you not to play those versions.

In regards to a specific version, there are some Wii games that were supposed to just be ports of PS360 games which ended up being something else entirely, sometimes with re-written stories and entirely different levels. I consider those specific games as Wii Exclusives.

One known example is Sonic Unleashed. Some will claim the Wii version is better because there are less werehog levels and no explorable hub worlds, which in turn makes for a more streamlined experience.

Another example, Far Cry 1. For the longest time there was a console edition (with a different subtitle name) and a PC edition, with the console version having entirely different levels but the same story told differently. Eventually, the PC version was ported to consoles (with some small caveats), but essentially when playing Far Cry 1, people would recommend the PC version 9 times out of 10.

Thankfully today, 99% of the time devs have figured out console controllers and how to port to consoles better, so that odd waste of money and resources is behind us.
 
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Neolombax said:
Exclusive means to exclude other things, hence only available to only 1.
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Or exclude some other things. Like exclusive stuff doesn't really meant to be 1 copy only, the boundary case of exclusivity.

Exclusivity is framework-dependent and game is exclusive if it fits in given framework, within given framework, like 6 month and console only. Context is important.
 
I'd say 'only on one system'.

But most of the time I think in terms of 'Nintendo/Sony/MS exclusive' when I talk about it, i.e. viewing, for example, BotW as an exclusive despite also being available on three different Nintendo platforms.

But I'd count something being 'exclusive' and something being '[Insert Brand] exclusive' as two separate things.
 
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