The ongoing erosion of exclusivity | This Week in Business

gamesindustry.biz:

Brendan Sinclair

Managing Editor

Friday 25th February 2022

This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check back every Friday for a new entry.

Exclusivity in games used to make a lot more sense. The industry was smaller, the opportunity was limited, and even the biggest licenses and movies could only support a handful of games on the market at any give time.

That was especially true considering that consoles had much less overlap in catalogs at the time, and when the same game did appear on multiple platforms, each version was typically tailored around the specific limitations and abilities of the target platform, effectively requiring a new version built from the ground-up for each system. (The excellent Finnish Retro Game Comparison Blog's write-up on the 10 different versions of The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants is a good refresher on how different these could be.)

So if you had a license like Spider-Man or The Simpsons, you'd find a partner like LJN or Acclaim and you'd let them handle the game strategy. (And given the reputation of licensed games at the time, you'd probably let them keep making those games even if the results were borderline unplayable.)

Exclusivity is far less common in gaming these days, as we were reminded by reports that The Lego Group will not be re-upping its deal with TT Games as it prepares a slate of Lego sports games with 2K (a soccer game this year, a racing game next year, and a third title beyond that).

Exclusivity in general just seems to be on a downturn these days. EA has lost its exclusive hold on Star Wars and the