A recent announcement made during E3 revealed that a whole batch of traditionally Playstation exclusive titles will be released for the X-box 360. Titles such as Ace Combat and Devil May Cry 4! Why? According to SCEA president, Jack Tretton, "We (Sony) don't buy exclusivity...We earn it." Sounds like "We don't buy respect", but maybe they need to start, because Microsoft sure seems to be buying lots of it.

Mega-Man creator and Capcom designer Keiji Inafune further enlightened us as to why this is happening. He said until recently it's been hard for them to develop multi-platform games, but recently a development engine was created that allows the creation of a game for both PS3 and X-360 simultaneously. He said "Developing Dead Rising and Lost Planet helped flush out everything in the development tool system - which is now pretty much complete..... So we decided to use that engine and make Devil May Cry 4 for the 360 and the PS3"

Keiji went on to say "So, now we can get the game out into the hands of more gamers - because 360 has such a huge installed base already, especially in the US, and as game makers we want as many people to have the chance to play our games as possible."

This of course is all just developer code for "We make more money this way". It sounds to me like they saw X-360's "huge installed base" and spent a ton of time creating a development engine for it. They then went to Sony and offered to keep their games exclusive if Sony paid them extra. Sony politely declined (probably can't afford it), but can't risk angering them. Since X-360 will sell more games the developers would rather just switch over to making X-box 360 exclusives if they were forced to choose one or the other.