It’s hardly just a couple of moneyhats though. Sony have been signing exclusivity deals relentlessly all last generation, and they’ve done them largely unanswered as a result of both Xbox having a weaker market position making it cheaper for them to do, but also because the practice of signing them is widely accepted for them, but not for MS.
There’s a reason why something like Final Fantasy sells so disproportionately on PlayStation… it’s because these exclusivity deals reinforce (or in some cases disrupt) audiences on a given platform, and as time goes on that becomes more difficult to undo. Sony’s had Final Fantasy in their corner for a long time now, going back to Final Fantasy 7, but the series DID eventually come to Xbox day and date beginning with Final Fantasy XIII, and was starting to cultivate an audience within that ecosystem that had a desire to play JRPGs. That Final Fantasy 7 Remake got moneyhatted (for what is still an uncertain length of time in regards to Xbox) isn’t a random coincidence. This type of moneyhat is a precisely targeted one to cause an entire genre of game not be viable on the platform.
There are some IP that within their sphere carry so much weight that they cause ripple effects across the genre. Sony’s Street Fighter V moneyhat effectively buried the entire fighter genre on Xbox, because nobody invested in that genre was going to opt for a console that lacked Street Fighter… and as a result other titles that weren’t (or at least I’m not aware of being) moneyhats would start to skip the console also, because if nobody that’s invested in that genre is opting for that console, why should the smaller, more niche IP target that console either, right?
So yes… timed exclusives very much can be used to push a competing platform out of the market, and Sony was routinely targeting games that would be the most crippling across the spectrum. Whether that be Final Fantasy (and possibly Persona?) in the JRPG space, Street Fighter in the fighting game space, the year (or two) long exclusive content deals for Destiny, and the exclusive map content for COD in the FPS space, etc… the goal was to make it so Xbox as a platform wasn’t a viable choice for the majority of the market. And quite frankly, it was working and working well… hence the situation in 2016 where MS bowing out of the market entirely was a very real possibility.
When that didn’t occur, Sony looked to land killer blows right away at the start of this generation. Hence the announcement of Final Fantasy XVI’s timed exclusivity ahead of the consoles being released, and the murmurs of a whole slew of others to be revealed in time. And the general response here was just that it was a foregone conclusion that PS5 would just continue to build on PS4’s momentum largely unimpeded. And considering the shit MS took back in 2015 when they dared to land a single comparable exclusivity deal with Rise of the Tomb Raider, that avenue of retaliation was clearly not available to them. Look how quick the clarification of the duration of exclusivity of RoTR was forced out of MS and SquareEnix, and then contrast that with Crash N’Sane Trilogy, Nier Automata, Final Fantasy 7R, KOTOR remake… or any of countless other deals where their eventual Xbox release was happily left vague as hell. That’s how we’re here today, because MS were either gonna commit fully and land some true heavy blows that made a real difference to the current landscape, or they were inevitably going to see their platform marginalised to the point where they had to drop out.
If people didn’t want to see the level of escalation we’re seeing now today… well, they shouldn’t have been so comfortable commending the ever increasing frequency and severity of deals Sony was making to cripple their primary competition. “Final Fantasy sells 80%+ on PlayStation anyways, so they may as well” and by extension “of course it makes sense for game X to skip Xbox, because the audience is all on PlayStation”. Well, congrats… now they won’t all be. The rampant desire for the glory days of PS2-era domination has led us here, and so cries about how unfair it is ring hollow.
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