As you may or may not have heard, long-time Playstation exclusive 2nd party developer Insomniac Games has announced that they are going multi-platform. Now, because they are 2nd party means that they had formed an alliance with Sony but were never owned by Sony and could pull away from the Playstation brand whenever they wished. Insomniac has been exclusive to the Playstation brand since the PS1. They continued this on the PS2 where they had huge success with their Ratchet & Clank series. Once on the PS3 though, the story was different. The first Resistance game they released was a launch title for the PS3 and had huge sales and is still in the top 10 most sold games for the PS3. Still, their followup games never caught on. They have since released 3 Ratchet & Clank games that have had sliding sales. While Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction sold 1.94 Million, Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time only pushed 1 million copies. Again, the first Resistance game had sold 3.69 Million while the far superior Resistance 2 (and I think one of the most underrated PS3 games) only managed 1.88 million.

This of course brings me to Insomniac’s decision to move to a 3rd party, multi-platform release. As the numbers have shown, the guys over at Insomniac have been hurting. This doesn’t make any of their games a flop in any form, but from such a AAA developer, it’s not the numbers I’m sure they had hoped for. So if we look at this as a pure business deal, it makes perfect sense. Cater to 35 million PS3 users or cater to PS3 and Xbox 360 (39 million) users? The decision is a simple one and my business side couldn’t agree more with their decision and wish this fantastic developer the best. But then the fan inside of me is the person who feels betrayed. This is the same company who has made their life on the Playstation. Insomniac wouldn’t be who they are if Sony didn’t give their space and say, just make fantastic games and here are all the resources you need. So it’s with that side of me that I don’t see them in the same eye and I’ll be the first to admit it: that’s my fanboy side.

But the question that really needs to be begged here is: is this Sony’s fault? Insomniac was pushing out a new AAA title per year for Sony (something that is very hard to actually accomplish), but as we see, the sales weren’t there. There is of course two causes for that. A lot of those games were published during the high price time of the PS3. With launch prices of $599, we’re only reaching the one year milestone of the $299 PS3. So this alone meant that the install base of the PS3 was not huge during the prior years. But maybe more damming then the price was the marketing or lack there of marketing for the Playstation. As many Sony fans will tell you, Sony has had zero presence on television. While Microsoft would blast ads left and right for Gears and Halo, I saw maybe one Resistance ad on TV, and ads for the Playstation were nonexistent. Again, it’s only really been in the last year that Sony has done a great job with the Kevin Butler ads, (I still wished that they aired more of them but it’s far better than years prior). But even with all of this in mind, the Playstation now has a healthy number of users and yet, it doesn’t move games like the 360 does and part of this is due to the more mature crowd. When a big 360 title comes out, it’s sure to sell over 1 million the first week, but with the Playstation, if it does 500k, it’s doing big. Some might point to the extra 4 million 360 users out there but the numbers don’t add up to those extra 4 million consuming so much more. I believe this has more to do with the younger 360 gamers being hardcore gamers who need to have something on day 1 and have had a 2 month pre-order where the PS3 users are more casual and older. This means that although they will buy, they don’t need to own it on day one and have other things in their lives besides gaming.

So in the end, what is to blame for Insomniac’s departure as a PS3 exclusive developer? The lack of sales? The failure of Sony to promote or the Playstation fans? Maybe all 3, and maybe that’s just the tide as long time Microsoft exclusive partner Bungie (creator of the Halo series) is now a 3rd party developer and will have their next game on both consoles as well. Regardless of the reason, I wish the guys over at Insomniac the best.