E3'10 Rambles: Exclusives

I was just watching the Microsoft E3 press conference on GameTrailers and cringed as some Microsoft guy spent the very first moments of speaking time at their press conference to proudly announce that Microsoft and Activision had put joined forces to make sure gamers had less options for how to experience their content by making it exclusive for x months before being available on other platforms. What exciting news. How generous.

In the next minute they go on to acknowledge that gamers are watching, so it wasn't just a pitch to retailers about how their evil machinations will generate dollars at the expense of gamers. Nope. They just said it directly to the people who otherwise would have had a simultaneous release. The sad thing comes from believing that the whole ploy will be successful.

I don't know that it is one of these things, but it feels like one of these things that you can expect to cash-in on short-term and lose out on long term. Where you hope they enjoy the fluff of extra money dumped into their Scrooge McDuck money pit, because the money leak somewhere inside it just got bigger, and that much harder to repair.

Now that I'm back from vacation, my first order of business is catching up on E3. I plan to jot down thoughts while going through all of the movies and press and share them on the blog, so expect plenty of rambling in the next few weeks.