A couple of weeks ago, Gabe Newell discussed the topic of console exclusive games and their impact on the industry. According to Newell, Valve funds the VR developers in the hopes that it will actually prevent the devs from taking exclusivity contracts, allowing them to publish the game on any VR device that they want. Oculus head of content Jason Rubin recently spoke with Games Industry and disagreed with Newell, stating that Oculus’ policies on exclusivity are good for the business.

“As a developer looks at a multi-million dollar production in VR right now, they say there’s no way that will earn its money back in any reasonable amount of time, so instead I’ll go make a non-VR PC game of that scale if I want to because that’s a better bet. We don’t like that. We don’t want it to be $500,000 games this year, million dollar games next year, two million dollar…and take decades or at least a decade to build itself to the point where you can afford bigger games. “So what Oculus has said is, ‘Why don’t we throw more money into the ecosystem than is justified by the consumer base,’ which will lead to a consumer base that’s larger, which will leave that second generation of developers to say, ‘Hey, let’s go build these games because now the consumers are there, and kickstart that decade long process in a much shorter length of time.’ And, to do that, we have put huge amounts of money into the ecosystem, more than any of our competitors.” — Jason Rubin

While Rubin believes that console exclusivity is not a bad idea, he does not want the dev to make their game exclusive forever.

“So if the first game barely makes its money back, the second game can be profitable because the consumer’s there. That’s theirs to do on their own on any platform they want. And in a lot of cases, we’re looking at software that’s in process, where the developers are running to the end of their logical stream of cash and they come to us and they say, ‘I want to put this in your store,’ and we say, ‘That’s awesome. However, we can tell it’s kind of unfinished.’ And they’re like, ‘We can’t finish it. We don’t have the money to finish it.’ And we say, ‘Well, how about we give you a little extra to finish it and in exchange you bring it out as an exclusive in our store for a limited amount of time, continue to develop for all platforms, and then put it out on all platforms?’ The better game gets to all consumers in that case. And those are the deals we’re making. And that, to me, makes a lot more sense than just let this thing work itself out over a decade.” — Jason Rubin

You can read the full interview by clicking here. What do you think about console exclusivity? Sound off in the comments below!

Source: Games Industry

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