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Discussion When did the switch occur; speaking on the changeover from the market being first party driven vs 3rd party driven of the past?

Uniomni

Uniomni

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Basically what it says.

All these showcases/directs and the excitement they bring just tells me that in a big way, 3P no longer holds the steering wheel for the enthusiast market.

Of course they still matter in a huge way(GTA/FIFA/MADDEN/2K anyone?) but just in terms of core enthusiasts hype, it seems many of these directs are considered fails if we're not constantly being wowed by platform holders studio work.

And I distinctly remember a time when 3P seemed like it was the end all and be all.

Yet nowadays, if we're not seeing titles from Naughty Dog, Monolithsoft, Rare, etc things are considered a dud.

Yes we know Nintendo has always been 1P driven but when did that change for Sony/MS?

The Wii60 generation? The following gen?

Or do you disagree with my take and think it's still a 3P driven market?

Thoughts?
 
With Nintendo, it's always been a thing as you note. With Sony, it started in the second half of the PS3 generation when Sony started selling the console off the back of major first party exclusives like God of War and Uncharted, and then TLOU solidified their hold over that market segment, and they went all in on supporting the PS4 with major first party hits, in turn creating more demand for seeing those hits.

Which obviously then caused Xbox to be judged by that same standard, and now here we are.
 
Hero of Hyrule said:
With Sony, it started in the second half of the PS3 generation when Sony started selling the console off the back of major first party exclusives like God of War and Uncharted, and then TLOU solidified their hold over that market segment, and they went all in on supporting the PS4 with major first party hits, in turn creating more demand for seeing those hits.
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It doesn’t help that 3rd parties became noticeably less prolific starting in the PS2/PS3 era. Square-Enix’s output dropped significantly during this period, as did Capcom and Konami. All this was in service of consolidating their outputs around specific brands like Final Fantasy, Resident Evil and Metal Gear Solid at the expense of smaller franchises (some of those franchises moved to portables which could support titles with smaller budgets).
 
Uniomni said:
Basically what it says.

All these showcases/directs and the excitement they bring just tells me that in a big way, 3P no longer holds the steering wheel for the enthusiast market.

Of course they still matter in a huge way(GTA/FIFA/MADDEN/2K anyone?) but just in terms of core enthusiasts hype, it seems many of these directs are considered fails if we're not constantly being wowed by platform holders studio work.

And I distinctly remember a time when 3P seemed like it was the end all and be all.

Yet nowadays, if we're not seeing titles from Naughty Dog, Monolithsoft, Rare, etc things are considered a dud.

Yes we know Nintendo has always been 1P driven but when did that change for Sony/MS?

The Wii60 generation? The following gen?

Or do you disagree with my take and think it's still a 3P driven market?

Thoughts?
Click to expand...
The market is still very driven by 3rd parties. One only needs to see what is doing well for that to become evident. Core enthusiast hype is a bubble who talks really loud but makes up a small portion of overall audiences.

Sony has been 3rd party driven since they entered into the market. And while they have tried to diversify themselves w/1st party offerings; they are still the place for all of the 3rd party content. Take away their 1st party stuff & Sony can still sell well.

MS is very much the same in this model as they’ve never been about 1st party content. That may change though in the coming years but they’ll taken dedication & consistency. Things that MS struggles w/a lot since entering in the industry
 
I think the market is still 3rd party driven aside from Nintendo who was forced to create a different kind of ecosystem after the Super NES.

You take away Madden NFL, Call of Duty, GTA, Elden Ring, etc. from Sony (the same way in which Nintendo doesn't have those IP currently) for example and they would be behind the XBox very quickly IMO.
 
While it's been up and down how dominant of a force Sony's first party games were, the PS1 was kept afloat by a lot of third party series and games. Tekken, Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, MGS, Tomb Raider, etc. were huge parts of the console's success. Crash Bandicoot and Gran Turismo were the only real big first party series on PS1 that you could say were a critical part of the console's identity and library, in my opinion.

So I feel like the question is a bit backwards. PS5 definitely relies on third party games as much if not more than its first party ones.

Xbox... idk. Xbox kinda does whatever. It's not a well managed brand, to say the least.
 
I would say it’s the opposite. Two generations ago the market was completely reliant on 1st party games and exclusives, but now everything is on PC and we’re slowly moving towards everything being on PC and all consoles. The only exception is Nintendo but they’ve always been the exception.

You chose to make this thread the year Sony announced Horizon is coming to Nintendo Switch and Call of Duty is a first party game but will sell the most on a console where it will be third party. Sony recently released the games on PlayStation 5 that produce the most revenue and half are Microsoft, the rest are third party.
 
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I'm not that familiar with Sony BUT I feel like Rare and other platformer studios are a unique situation because their IPs never really stuck around as long as they should have like Nintendo does with Mario, so I'd argue that the hype for those is inherently different than dealing with third party titles and everything that comes with them.
 
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what??????????????????????????????????????

the "core" audience being loud isn't indicative of the entire medium

third parties are still incredibly important and offer a ton of stuff that first parties don't, as well as unique flavors of what they do

entire genres exist and flourish outside the first party bubble, with large passionate fanbases that hoot and cheer when their game shows up in the latest hour long ad stream, with many having to hold their breath for news on their games until nintendo reveals their next console

nintendo just bought a studio specifically for their expertise in bringing over third party games to nintendo platforms so they could get more

the other two console manufacturers pushing themselves to do more multi-plat releases is a whooole thing on its own, the product of several very, very bad decisions that's probably been exacerbated by not only developing games during a pandemic, but launching new hardware during it
 
For Nintendo it was in N64, as third parties went with PSOne and so they needed a differentiating factor. Of course their first party games were great since the NES, and the spine of the software range, but I think that’s when they became vital as before then a large portion of third party games got a version on their platforms. For Sony it was the late 00s, mostly around critical acclaim for Uncharted and God of War, again as they needed a differentiating factor vs the 360.

However, both of those I think there’s a real difference between platform holder focus on them as a strategy, and list warz used for console war arguments. Especially as the gaming consumer base got older.
 
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I'd say the main move from 3P to 1P as a focus for the relative "success" of an announcement/direct is mostly tied to how most 3rd parties nowadays aren't stuck to one platform anymore. There's a lot of reasons (mainly good ones that benefit everyone) for this, but one rather curious effect of it is that if you're third party... you're just going to advertise in every platform announcement you can think of because that's the smart thing to do.

Like, it's hard to really get invested in a 3rd party announcement in a State of Play and see it as a "success" for the PlayStation if the same game is going to show up in both the Xbox Showcase and Nintendo Direct to maximize eyeballs on the game.

By contrast, console makers usually aren't incentivized to move their games to other systems (we're only relatively recently seeing Sony toy around with bringing their games to PC, Microsoft's output collapsed but is similarly only really Xbox + PC, with the latter only existing because Xbox is a failure outside US/UK, and Nintendo doesn't do multiplatform because it'd undermine their strategy), which gives a first party announcement more "weight" to it in that regard; you're not going to find say, the Mario Wonder announcement at SGF or the PC Gaming Show.
 
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PS and Xbox are still third party driven consoles. Sure, entusiasts on forums clamour for PS and Xbox showcases but most people buying PS still cares more about FIFA, Madden, Cod and GTA games. And that becomes clear when you look at how dominated PS software sales are by third party games.

Switch is the only system you can really objectively say is first party driven.
 
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That's right, in my opinion it is indeed so.

It should be noted in advance that this is not the case for the market..

But in terms of hype and enthusiasm, most of the first party games that currently excite audiences rather than third-party games. I don't know why this situation happened. My inference is due to the widespread belief that the quality of first party games is higher.

Some peculiar phenomena that arise from this are that I once noticed that when an exclusive game becomes a multi-platform game, the enthusiasm surrounding it disappears.
 
3rd parties are expected on everything now. Back in the 4th and 5th gen, that wasnt guranteed by the 6th and 7th gen that was going away gradually.

For all intents and purposes with the rise of the PC market, consolecparity, and extended life cycles. 3rd parties arent the major reason peoole get excited for a machine. Its just expected theyll be there.

You buy a console for the exclusive perks. Usually 1st party.
 
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third parties were always and still are important but they are ultimately there as extra incentives, supplementing a first-party offering.

3DS had great third party support from the jump, but sales really picked up in 2013 when Nintendo had a game a month. Fire Emblem, Luigi's Mansion, Animal Crossing, Donkey Kong Country, Mario & Luigi Dream Team, Pokemon X/Y, Zelda: A Link Between Worlds.

momentum of exclusives is guaranteed to sell hardware, no matter the form factor. most of the time that comes in the form of first-party games, since that's ultimately what differentiates the platform from the competition the most. third parties are just icing on the cake at that point, but sometimes the icing can be just as pivotal. a big kneecap to the Wii U's momentum was UbiSoft delaying the formerly exclusive Rayman Legends 6 months to port it to/launch it on everything else. was gunna be an exclusive must-have and now people had to wait, and it's another month with nothing new on the system. Gotta keep your userbase active, and most of the time, especially in Nintendo's case, that activity comes from their own games.
 
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Hardware sales moving away from being driven by exclusive games happened with the 360/PS3 era. Games that were previously synonymous with a given platform like FF13 and DMC4 were multiplatform and that was a huge deal. You still had your MGS4 and your Mass Effect, but by the end of the generation exclusives were not common outside of first-party franchises and niche Japanese games that didn't get a 360 version. It also helped that the big games that gen, GTA and CoD, were multiplat from day 1 starting with CoD3 and GTA4. PS4/Xbox One was the nail in the coffin and when even those aforementioned niche Japanese games started getting Xbox versions sometimes.

Once all third-party games became multiplatform, that's when enthusiasts who buy hardware solely for first-party games started really hyping up first-parties specifically, since otherwise they can't justify their console purchase.
 
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