How Important Is Developing Distinguished IPs for a Platform to Succeed?

PlayStation 5 is set to welcome a bunch of exclusives in 2024. From Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth to Silent Hill 2, gamers have much to look forward to. The same goes for the Nintendo Switch; games like Paper Mario, Metroid Prime 4, and much more are anticipated to launch this year. These IPs are what keep their fans coming back to them. But while these unique IPs are no doubt a large part of a console’s success, how exactly does it help?

It is definitely crucial for a platform holder to understand that they need unique IPs for their console to be successful and stand out. Let’s see everything good and bad that comes with the development of new IPs.

An interesting new IP has the power to make and break a platform

Over 3 decades ago, when Nintendo decided to end their deal with Sony and develop their own console, Sony obviously wasn’t happy. It didn’t take them very long to develop their own console, called the PlayStation. It was a disc-based console; CDs back then were a unique form of media for a video game platform. They could hold much more video and audio content than Nintendo’s carts. That’s why many developers and publishers shifted from the Nintendo 64 to Sony’s PlayStation. The biggest and most prominent of them was Square Enix, which decided to launch their new game, Final Fantasy VII, on PlayStation rather than N64.

That generation was dominated by Sony’s new console. Yet Nintendo somehow kept its own boat floating, as they might have lost Final Fantasy, but they still had The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario. Both franchises entered the 3D plane on the N64 with Ocarina of Time and Mario 64. These three games—Final Fantasy VII, Ocarina of Time, and Mario 64—are regarded to this day among the best games ever made.

In 2023, Nintendo’s own The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time launched to a very positive response from critics all over. What was even better is that this game sold ten million copies in just three days of its launch. This kind of performance is not very common, especially for a title that launches on a single platform. The same was the case with Pokemon Scarlet and Violet.

So yes, developing new IPs works. It works if the company has spent time developing it and actually knows what they are doing. It pretty much comes down to understanding your fanbase and catering to what they have been craving.

Both Sony and Nintendo know well enough what their specific fan bases want. Sony has, over the years, bought developers like Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games, who have worked very hard developing games that have now become a trademark for Sony’s PlayStation console. Whenever one thinks of PlayStation, one thinks of The Last of Us, God of War, Uncharted, and Spider-Man.

On the other hand, when a gamer wants to play some really fun games on Nintendo, IPs like The Legend of Zelda, Pokemon, Super Mario, Metroid and so on come to mind.

Without a recognizable IP, a platform does not have much of an identity!

If a platform does not have many games that actually stand out, it might have a hard time convincing gamers to buy it. Xbox can be the prime example in this case. This platform was once a playground for interesting new ideas. Gears of War launched on it, and then there was Halo. These even became system sellers for a period of time.

But today, Gears of War is just another cover for the third-person shooter franchise. The worst thing is that Microsoft does not even have the oversight to try to reinvent this series. Halo, on the other hand, has been trying very hard to ‘borrow’ ideas from other popular shooters and has failed miserably. Microsoft also tried to cash in on the Battle Royale fad, and they did not even get to fail on that front. They simply canceled the game recently, after years of work.

On the other hand, look at PlayStation. With Insomniac Games, players finally got a ‘successful’ Spider-Man franchise on the console, one that wasn’t simply a movie based game. It kept getting better, and the recent Spider-Man 2 sold 2.5 million units in 24 hours to become the fastest selling PlayStation studios title.

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Coming back to Microsoft, all it has left is to buy other companies that own some known popular IPs. They purchased Bethesda, and very recently they closed a massive deal with Activision Blizzard. These deals have brought massive IPs like Call of Duty, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Doom under Microsoft’s umbrella.

Let’s hope they know better about managing pre-existing popular IPs than they did about creating them. Without any reason for people to buy an Xbox console, they are already very low on the sales charts.

No matter what anyone says, exclusives make or break a system. And having desirable IPs as exclusives only makes people want these consoles more. The biggest platform holders know this very well. And that’s why fans will keep getting interesting new titles from at least two of them in the coming future.

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