Former PlayStation boss calls exclusivity the industry's 'Achilles' heel … Helldivers 2 has shown that'

As PC players, we've had ample reason to gripe about the culture of console exclusivity for some time—these games are running on hardware that's often a smidge outdated by the time it hits the shelves, yet we can't get our grubby little mitts on them? 

Granted, there's plenty of reasons as to why a dev team would want to optimise something for a specific loadout—the PC's breadth of potential compatibility issues are a complete nightmare, especially as games get bigger in scope.

PlayStation has been a particular pain point over the past few years, with some genuinely excellent games like Final Fantasy 7 Remake, 2018's God of War, and Insomniac's Spider-Man taking their sweet time to mosey on over to Steam. Trends have continued with Rebirth, God of War: Ragnarök, and Spider-Man 2 respectively. 

But worry not, fair keyboard warrior—it seems like the tide is largely turning according to both PlayStation's current president, and now its former one too. That's according to an interview with ex-head honcho Shawn Layden, courtesy of GamesBeat.

«When your costs for a game exceed $200 million,» Layden says, «Exclusivity is your Achilles' heel. It reduces your addressable market. Particularly when you're in the world of live service gaming or free-to-play. Another platform is just another way of opening the funnel, getting more people in.»

Layden's reasoning here—that console exclusivity primarily hurts live service games—is a smidge corporate, especially considering many of the PlayStation exclusives I've been drooling over are single-player. Still, when he notes that «in a free-to-play world, as we know, 95% percent of those people will never spend a nickel … You have to improve your odds by cracking the funnel open», he's not necessarily wrong.

The recent wave of live service games has followed a very similar pattern to the wave of MMORPGs in 2010-2020. As I pointed out last year, the problem is still very much the same: A big thing becomes popular, companies want to make