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Comment by chucknelson | Hacker News Reader

Disagree a bit with the ecosystem comments.

You're underselling the exclusives on PS3 and X360. For all of the Zelda, Mario, and other first party Nintendo games, you have a bunch of Uncharted, God of War, Killzone, Gran Turismo, Halo, Gears of War, Forza, Viva Pinata, etc. between PS3 and X360. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_exclusives_... - there are a lot of exclusives between the two.

I would just say Nintendo was left out of all of the cross-platform games, which is a shame. Much of the Wii's "unique" ecosystem is garbage.

We may be going through a new "shakeout" period, similar to the 3DO and Jaguar days. As for mainstream adoption, I don't see any of the newcomers (OUYA, Project Shield, Piston) taking off, but it'll be fun to see what happens.

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True. Investment in first-party studios is critical to create "great" games. Most often, these are the games that push the boundaries and will be remembered, IMO. Journey(PS3) for example came out of thatgamecompany, an awesome game studio that benefited from Sony's Santa Monica incubator.

First party games are still the "killer apps" of game consoles, although they aren't the only ones (yup, I believe ecosystems are importants, too). Nintendo is sitting on gold mine with the Wii U's MiiVerse, a twitter-like social network, but with drawings added (of course of limited size, only black and white). But it might be "just another app" if they don't invest in it.

I wonder if there's anyone else in my boat..

None of the 360 exclusives are really interesting to me. I've never played a Halo or Gears of war game. A lot of the PS3 exclusives -do- interest me, I'd played the previous games in a few of the series on the PS2.

But I own a 360, and not a PS3. And I don't really feel like getting a PS3 at this point, being so late in the cycle, and owning the 360 version of -most- of the games I play.

I'm in your boat. Except I have a PS3. My best advice: get a second-hand PS3 Slim (a bit better than the last model IMHO), and start playing. The PS3 game library is pretty big now, so I'm sure you'll find what you like.

If Valve makes their new platform the only way to play Half-Life 3... that might be the first game in the series that I'll have to skip. I hate to say that, because I don't doubt that it will be an awesome game, but it's just not enough to sell me on a whole new gaming platform.

I don't see that happening, partially because it would be very un-Valve-like, and partially because it would be stupid.

Valve, in the past, has pushed for more hardware to be able to play its games, not less. Sure, it started out on Windows, but it's made a very respectable delivery platform for the Mac, and now they're on their way to Linux. Saying, "the only way to play our game is on this one specific piece of hardware you have to buy from us" would go against quite a bit of what they've been doing over the past 5 years.

Also, it would be stupid. The people who are drooling over the possibility of HL3 are PC gamers. People who invest cash in gaming rigs, who probably like building their own computers. Saying, "Want HL3? Now you have to buy our hardware!" would be more or less giving their fans the middle finger.

I expect the Steam Box will be hardware, and possibly a customized Linux distribution. And I expect that if you want to "build your own" Steam Box, you'll be able to.

I think the poster's point wasn't that there aren't any exclusives, but that the exclusives don't come down to the console hardware. That a capable team could recreate Killzone or Uncharted on the 360 and the average consumer wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

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