It’s interesting to see where we’ve come in the span of just two to three years. Several years ago, when Final Fantasy XIII was announced for the Xbox 360 as well as PS3, it was taken as the final sign of the death of third party exclusives. However, nowadays, we have Street Fighter 5 exclusive to the PS4, Bayonetta 2 exclusive to the Wii U and even Rise of the Tomb Raider being a very top-tier timed exclusive to the Xbox 360 and Xbox One.

So will third party exclusives play a big role this generation? GamingBolt spoke to Dom Matthews, Product Development Ninja for Ninja Theory – which is bringing Hellblade out exclusively for the PS4 after working on third party titles for the last few years – about his thoughts.

“You know, I don’t know whether it’s gonna play a big role, I mean, it’s something that’s happening now in the market, but I don’t think the players really notice all that much, the players just wanna play games, on their new gen consoles or their PC, and I don’t think they really care where the game may be. And I think there are far bigger topics in gaming currently than any exclusivity or anything.”

Even with third party games that aren’t strictly exclusives, there are several other arrangements that are made such as exclusive bundles, marketing and distribution, etc. The best examples are the timed DLC for Call of Duty games on Xbox platforms and the recent timed exclusive DLC for Destiny on PlayStation platforms.

It’s pretty smart from a third party perspective – who wouldn’t want a major publisher handling all the marketing, distribution and publicity, thereby increasing exposure for their game and even providing financial assistance?

Matthews responded as to whether this is a factor for all third party exclusivity deals. “Well, of course, for us it allows us great things, for instance, for us, we were able to announce our game at Sony’s conference, in front of thousands of journalists.

“And we’re a small team, that’s something we wouldn’t ordinarily be able to do by ourselves, I mean, we wouldn’t be able to get a thousand journalists in a room just to see what Ninja Theory is working on. So, to have the chance to have our game highlighted by Sony alongside the other great games coming to their platform, it’s the kind of thing where it’s great for us to have that kind of opportunity.”

What are your thoughts on the rise of the third party exclusives? Let us know in the comments below.

It seems that third-party developers did not know that PlayStation 4 would be including 8GB of GDDR5 RAM until Sony’s reveal event in February – even though they already revieced development kits before the console was officially announced.

VideoGamer.com got a chance to talk to Just Add Water’s CEO Stewart Gilary – who is developing a unknown IP for PlayStation. Gilray stated that third-parties were originally told that console would only be equipped with 4GB of RAM. However, after they found out the real RAM specs after console’s reveal they were pleasantly surprised.

This is what Gilray had to say regarding this matter; “We were told [PS4] was 4GB originally,” Gilray told us, “and we first knew it had 8GBs when Mark said at the event’s stage, ‘And it has 8GB of memory.’ We’d had kits at that point for a good while.”

Gilray assumed that only “a couple of really close first-parties” knew that PS4 would have 8 GB before the console’s reveal, “but I think most third-parties, if not all third-parties were like, ‘Yeah, 4GB, awesome, can’t wait.

“It’s a fantastic amount of memory,” he goes on, “especially DDR5 memory, because it’s so fast you don’t have to have everything there at once. You can swap it in and out instantly, effectively. But when they said 8GB it was like, ‘Ooookay.'”

Gilray also said; “added bonus” of PS4’s memory is that Sony has “already ring-fenced the system memory away from the game memory,” Gilray adds, “so there’s none of this business that we had with PS3 of having to share memories.

“When you press the PlayStation button on a PS3 game, you get the basic XMB up [but] to do anything you have to quit the game, because of the memory for it. With PS4 we don’t have that because the system memory is already ring-fenced for itself.”

After hearing Gilray’s comments it is easily assumed that the third-party developers originally developed games that targeted lower system requirements than the actual console’s capabilities. This might just explain the reason why Thief will be capped at 30 FPS rather than 60.

PlayStation 4 is slated to come out this Holiday season worldwide. Stay tuned for more next-generation news here at GamingBolt.

Source – VideoGamer

Wii Sports designer Katsuya Eguchi said in an interview with Edge that Nintendo, unlike so many previous years, is hoping to see a lot of third party support for the Wii U. He says Nintendo will provide them with technical support and also ideas on how to make games for the Wii U hardware, but he hoped the third parties are open to hearing Nintendo out and what they suggest.

Of course we’ll support them technically, giving any development assistance they require, but each third party has their proven franchises – the franchises that have done really well for them,” Eguchi said.

“I’m hoping they’ll be open to hearing suggestions – ideas from Nintendo on how to really take advantage of the Wii U’s features and offer the public maybe a different spin on those already proven franchises.”

Eguchi said that Nintendo itself is looking at Wii U in a different light than how they saw their consoles previously. “Of course, with those fan-favourite IPs, we’ll continue to offer games based on those characters, in those worlds, with the Wii U. but if there are opportunities for us to come up with new iPs that work well with this new system we’ll jump on those as well.”

evelopers and publishers like Epic, Ubisoft and EA have already expressed their interest in the Wii U. Others like BioWare are not so confident right now.

Unlike the Wii, and the GCN, and the N64, Nintendo is actually looking to have strong third party support for the Wii U. “We think it very important to make several hits from the third-party software publishers within the first year from the release of the platform, while offering Nintendo software seamlessly,” Satoru Iwata, Nintendo boss, said in a recent shareholders meeting.

“In order to achieve this goal, we have shared information about the new hardware with the software publishers earlier than we did previously and built a cooperative structure, and we are developing several titles in collaboration with these publishers.

“I cannot talk in detail about the names of the titles, or with which publishers we are currently collaborating, because we have not announced this information yet, but what we are aiming for with the Nintendo 3DS and the Wii U is, platforms which have much more software and a wider variety of software than the former Nintendo DS or Wii.

“Therefore, we are thinking of creating an environment where software from other companies will become hits.”

“[We’re] prepared to invest in order to make this a reality,’ he concluded. Wow, to say “third party support” and “Nintendo” in the same sentence sounds kind of strange, but by the looks of it, this might actually happen.