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[Oof85]

Basically what it says.

All these showcases/directs and the excitement they bring just tells me that in a big way, 3P no longer holds the steering wheel for the enthusiast market.

Of course they still matter in a huge way(GTA/FIFA/MADDEN/2K anyone?) but just in terms of core enthusiasts hype, it seems many of these directs are considered fails if we're not constantly being wowed by platform holders studio work.

And I distinctly remember a time when 3P seemed like it was the end all and be all.

Yet nowadays, if we're not seeing titles from Naughty Dog, Monolithsoft, Rare, etc things are considered a dud.

Yes we know Nintendo has always been 1P driven but when did that change for Sony/MS?

The Wii60 generation? The following gen?

Or do you disagree with my take and think it's still a 3P driven market?

Thoughts?

 

[LavitzSlambert]

8th gen AAA open world trend. You have HD and 4K quality, with content to keep players busy for over 80 hours, without a growing userbase, and competing against cheap older games seemingly always on sale (not to mention an extraordinary amount of content being churned out from other media sources). And at that time you hadn't had the new $70 price point, it was over a decade since games jumped from $50 to $60.

 

[bitbydeath]

Last-gen they started to heavily deteriorate.

Ubisoft became an Assassin’s Creed factory.
Activision became a COD factory.
Bethesda became a Skyrim remaster factory.
Rockstar didn’t do much outside of GTA remasters, and RDR2.
I don’t know if EA accomplished anything aside from sports.

Did I miss anyone?

 

[Freelance Yakuza]

Maybe thanks to the internet? Now a days Take 2, EA, Capcom can all present anything they want at any point, so "wasting" time presenting something that will inevitably launch on your console instead of exclusives gets people bored

 

[tommyleelynn]

6th Generation was the most 3rd party supported.

7th gen jump say a lot of closures from middleware publishers and devs. Rise of indies.

 

[Deerock71]

Nintendo:

 

[Katajx]

I don’t think that ever changed. My favorite games are still made by the third party pubs.

Gotta give Sony credit for the exposure their non Spider-man games get though, even if they aren’t always my cup of tea.

 

[Gaiff]

It switched when Xbox acquired a bunch of studios and made them first-party. The biggest releases are still third-party for the most part.

 

[bender]

Xbox from the beginning with Halo. Playstation is more debatable. I'd argue the seeds were planted with God of War on PS2 and took hold during the PS3 generation.

 

[Robb]

Not sure.

For me personally 3rd party has always just been an extra on top of the first party stuff. I’ve never bought a system to play 3rd party games.

 

[poppabk]

Last-gen they started to heavily deteriorate.

Ubisoft became an Assassin’s Creed factory.
Activision became a COD factory.
Bethesda became a Skyrim remaster factory.
Rockstar didn’t do much outside of GTA remasters, and RDR2.
I don’t know if EA accomplished anything aside from sports.

Did I miss anyone?

It's not that they deteriorated but they focused in on what is most profitable. Why take risks on new IP that fails time after time when you can carve out a part of the market and expand the profitability of your core franchises.
EA and Ubisoft still try, but I am pretty sure it is to bolster their subscription services more than a genuine push.

 

[Varteras]

I'm not sure how true it is that the market is 1st party driven. Even after Microsoft buying Activision. Which only happened very recently. Has the balance shifted? Considerably, yes. All three first-party companies now produce a significant share of the highest rated, highest selling, and highest engagement games.

But you still have plenty of third-party companies collectively doing more. Larian, Take-Two, FromSoft, Sega, Supergiant, CD Projekt, Square Enix, Capcom, Asobo, Platinum, Ubisoft, Bandai Namco, Remedy, Vanillaware, Koei Tecmo, Warner Bros, Arrowhead, Riot, Epic, Electronic Arts, miHoYo, and a myriad of other developers.

All who produce games that can stand up to those made by the first-parties in any one category or combination of reception, sales, and continuous play. First-parties will even partner with these companies to produce games for them which help to fill gaps in their own first-party developed lineups.

Keep in mind that these shows are largely for press and enthusiasts. The kind of people they know tune in to these sort of things. The people with the strongest reactions are frequently in the "fanboy" camp as it is. So, for them, they're eagerly awaiting their favorite company to announce a new "exclusive" for their favorite hardware. I can assure you that the reactions to most of those games would be, comparatively, quite muted across forums and social media in the event they were fully multiplatform. Your average gamer doesn't stress or emphasize such games anywhere near as much, if it all.

Microsoft had a great show. But it would not surprise me at all if GTA 6 ultimately outsells every single new game in that show. Combined. Fortnite, Apex, Counterstrike, Valorant, and League of Legends are still crushing in the live service realm.

At some point, there will be a moment where the industry collectively makes a choice on how to handle the categorization of some of these first-party games. Call of Duty is now technically a first-party game. But should we consider it as such when, for all practical concerns, it is a third-party game available on pretty much, soon to be every, platform? Doom is in a similar boat. World of Warcraft is a first-party game, but it's not even on Xbox or Gamepass. It's a PC-only title running on a whole separate service. How first-party is a game that's not even on your platform or service?

This isn't relegated to Xbox games. PlayStation is dipping its toes in those same waters. Their live service games instantly go to PC. They will be putting games on Mobile. Hell, Death Stranding is already there and they own that IP. MLB is on all consoles. LEGO Horizon will only NOT be on Xbox. They now own Bungie, with Destiny being on all consoles and PC. Marathon will be following suit. An increasing number of their games are being found elsewhere.

I'm not planting a flag one way or the other. But you can clearly already see the conversations being had about how to look at things. How to categorize them. What matters anymore and what doesn't. The emphasis is changing and we may very well find ourselves right back where we were, faster than you think. Where damn near everything, with few exceptions, is pretty much "third-party".

 

[ZehDon]

Back in the day, third parties not supporting hardware was a real possibility. Now-a-days, not so much.

Way back, platforms were almost completely bespoke, often containing hardware that presented very different visions of future computing. This meant that support was costly because ports weren't just recompilations of the same x86 code - they were often entirely different versions of the game that needed to be re-built entirely. As the number of consoles decreased, and the differences between them was slowly whittled away, third party support transformed from being something you had to beg, borrow and steal for, to something that you'll basically get automatically as long as you have enough units in the wild for them to recoup the platform costs. This shifted the burden from third party to first party in terms of platform differentiation, and this really came to a head during the Xbox 360 and PS3 era, where basically everyone else was gone. From then on, third parties support everyone unless a specific title is money hatted.

Moving forward, I think we're going to see platform differentiation dissolve further. Home console hardware has already homogenised to the point that platforms like Digital Foundry are running out of shit to nitpick. I suspect software is the next to go, and we're seeing Xbox already shift in that direction, where it's going to sell its games wherever it can to create growth in a market that hasn't actually grown. I suspect the big differentiator will be the services available on a given platform. Xbox has Game Pass, PlayStation has PS+ and Nintendo has Nintendo Switch Online. So, sure, you can buy Sea of Thieves and Gears of War on PlayStation, but you'll get them on Game Pass on Xbox for a lot less. Sure, you can buy The Last of Us Re-Re-Release 12 on PC, but you'll get it in PS+ for a lot less. Sure, you can emulate Nintendo's best games on your smart phone for free, but ... er... I think Nintendo are still working on that next part.

 

[Madserb2023]

Apart from Nintendo, third parties have always been equal to or greater than exclusives. I primarily play exclusives/second party games, as I imagine most on here do which creates a false impression regarding the importance of them. Going back 20 years or more, everytime I went to someone's house and looked at their game collection it was always 90% third party, primarily sports games, crappy movie games etc.