Interview with Shane Kim from Microsoft

Shack: Overseeing development at Microsoft Game Studios, you obviously deal heavily with matters related to first party and exclusives. With the way things are going these days, it seems like those two terms might as well be interchangeable. What are your thoughts on that?

Shane Kim: Oh, I definitely agree. You're not going to get exclusives from third parties in the future--not very many, anyway. The economics of the business just don't support it. It costs too much money to make and to market the titles, so third parties almost can't afford it, and hardware guys can't afford to pay a third party publisher to compensate them for the opportunity cost. You're going to see third party titles on every platform, and we can't count on third parties to do our heavy lifting. That's what the job of the first party is, and my job in particular is to make MGS competitive versus Sony first party.