Why Isn’t Titanfall Coming to Playstation?

Electronic Arts has revealed that Respawn’s Titanfall will remain an exclusive title for the Xbox One, Xbox360, and PC. This has left a number of fans scratching their heads and asking why would a move like this be made. Isn’t there more money to be made if you have a multi-platform release? Why would EA turn down an opportunity to bring its new IP to the Sony Playstation?

It is my belief that there could be a couple of different factors for this decision. The first, and probably most obvious possibility is that Microsoft paid a nice chunk of change in order to keep Titanfall an exclusive to Xbox and PC. Microsoft has a large money chest that they certainly don’t mind dipping into when it comes to their Xbox division. It has been previously reported that Microsoft is investing $1 billion into games for the Xbox One. This money was meant for game studios, and for securing exclusives for the Xbox One.

The other possibility for Titanfall remaining exclusive to Xbox and PC could be the cloud. When Titanfall was first revealed, Giantbomb sat down and did a roundtable interview with Respawn’s developers. This interview was full of info on how the cloud worked and some of the benefits. For some reason, Giantbomb has pulled the original video with the interview. But I had transcribed the interview from an earlier post where I compared the Xbox One and PS4 cloud.

Respawn:
When you look at it. Microsoft and Google are really the only two people who have a “Cloud”. A technical description of a cloud. They have data centers all over the world with tons of fast machines in them and they can slice them up however they want and turn them into virtual machines. And what they have done is exposed that in a very awesome way for Xbox One games. So if you’re in Connecticut and you want to play a game, we can say okay, here is the data center that you are going to go to because its the closest one and you have a 30 ping to it. And there’s no empty servers, so lets spin one up for you in 5 seconds and off you go.

We don’t have to provision hardware, we don’t have to go out and buy a bunch of servers and rack them in different places, it’s just there. It’s easy. It gets rid of all that fear of how this is all actually going to work. We have that available to use.

Let’s get crazy here and say it (Titanfall) gets popular in Japan. If we didn’t think it was going to be popular there and we didn’t buy a bunch of servers to put there, we would be screwed. (Cloud) Helps alleviate those types of problems. – You couldn’t make this game without the dedicated server support

Giantbomb:
So what do you do on the PC? Do you have to replicate elements of that structure for your version or do they have something you can use?

Respawn:
We won’t get all the niceties on PC that you get on Xbox One. There will have to be some engineering of things

The Titanfall developers have been pretty open with the fact that the Xbox One cloud plays a major role in the games development.  They also point out, that just because the game will be on PC – it doesn’t mean that the PC version will have all of the bells and whistles that come with the Xbox One version.

So was it money or infrastructure that made this decision?  Maybe it was a mixture of both.  One day we may hear the backstory on what really happened.  Until then, Respawn has hinted that future games, (Possibly Titanfall 2) could be made for the PS4.  And some of us still remember that exclusive Mass Effect and how that turned out in the end.

 

@AdanGarciaG Of course we will, just not the first Titanfall.

— Vince Zampella (@VinceZampella) October 29, 2013

Do you think this news will have any impact on gamers?  A recent VGN Poll found that 60% of users said that exclusive games will have an impact on their console of choise.

 

Microsoft investing $1 billion into games on Xbox One: Joystiq

Titanfall will be exclusive to Xbox One, Xbox 360, and PC for the lifetime of the title:  Xbox Wire

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