No, my post wasn't exclusively directed to you Croyles.

I was just giving my two cents on the industry and what I feel the loss of exclusives is really doing to Sony. But lack of competition? Hello, this is what first and second party developers are for! :rolleyes2 MS has Bungie and Rare (suckers) Sony has the Ico team as well as the teams that brought us Legend of Dragoon and Arc the Lad, and lets face it, the only thing Nintendo has going for its non-handheld console is its first party developers. The ones that have kept them afloat for three console generations right now.

The system specs are also different so I feel some companies can be commissioned to build games specifically for the system. Especially since the last few generations have made making AAA titles cost million of dollars. Exclusiveness to a system is not going to earn these third party developers back their money, its better for them to either go multi-platform to earn back their income or the console companies need to start making better incentives to stay exclusive. I really feel Sony shot themselves in the foot with the PS3 and due to its slow start, more developers are jumping ship instead of foolishly placing all their eggs in one basket.

Granted, Sony has always done well because they had a better library of third party developers than the other two consoles but I feel they easily forget this and instead of building a system to the specs of the developers that was both powerful and economical; they instead tried to promote their own technology and boasted how powerful it is. The #1 complaint against Sony in the last generation was that the PS2 was difficult to program for; and in this generation, it seems its even worse. I'm not saying Sony is doomed but I can't give them pity cause they should have paid more attention to the warnings. We've known for awhile that SE's White Engine was being designed to applicable outside of the PS3 specs. Sony needs to make amends to the third party developers if they want to regain their dominance.

Overall, I feel third party exclusives are bad for third party developers unless they magically chose right and picked the console the fickle market decided to praise this generation. I mean, for crying out loud, Square and Enix joined forces because both were suffering financially (Square more than Enix) and so they could combine their forces to cut back on production costs. The last console generation saw many mergers and the main reason was because of production costs. Obviously, I feel a new deal must be made between third party developers and console companies on how to fix this problem and I see major third party developers like SE and Capcom going multi-platform as a good sign to get all parties at the bargaining table.

Exclusives are good for the console not for the developers unless you have a damn good PR group that can convince people that your game is going to be the end all be all of existence...