LogFAQs > #980304406

Exclusivity is kind of dying out altogether. With how account-based consoles are now and the extent to which digital libraries tie people down to whichever platform can access them, it's becoming increasingly harder to get people with one console to jump ship to another. That means there's generally more money to be made just selling more copies of a given game by putting it on new platforms instead of keeping it exclusive and hoping it's enough to convince people to buy your console.

Nintendo, of course, continues to just do its own thing, but they're also not really competing against Sony or Microsoft in the direct sense, so they don't have to convince people to buy their console instead of a PS/Xbox/PC. Just to buy it in addition to one.

I figure this is actually what Sony was banking on with the whole Helldivers PSN thing: If players have to have a PSN account to keep playing the game, that gets them into the Playstation ecosystem and creates further opportunities to sell them incentives that will drive them to choose Playstation the next time they're shopping for a system. It backfired, though, because PC players in particular are already thoroughly entrenched in the PC ecosystem due its decades of backwards compatibility. That's inevitably going to result in an audience that would rather stop playing this one game than let themselves be dragged into a new ecosystem.