According one of Sony's brand managers, the platform holder prefers to have more exclusive in-game content than more exclusive titles. When asked about the battle for third party exclusives, PlayStation software senior brand manager Scott McCarthy outlined Sony's strategy to ScrawlFX.
“We work very closely with our 3rd parties publishers, not necessarily to lock down games exclusively, but to lock up exclusive parts of games,” said McCarthy. “A good example is Batman: Arkham Asylum, where you could only play as the Joker on PlayStation 3.”
“When you make a title exclusive, you limit its promotional power; we don’t want to do that. We want games to be as big as possible — it’s great for the industry. However, we want to make sure that you play it on the best system possible, so we like to take parts of games and make them exclusive to the PlayStation system,” he added.
It's an interesting tactic that Microsoft is also attempting to employ, with recent timed DLC exclusives like additional content for Call of Duty: Black Ops. Other examples include the 3D-enabled PlayStation 3 version of Mortal Kombat, the full port of Dead Space Extraction with the PS3 version of Dead Space 2, or Portal 2 for PS3 including a free copy of the game for PC or Mac.
The real question is: is it working for publishers? Are people overwhelmingly choosing the version with additional content?
