Titanfall Was Once Meant To Come To PS4

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Billy Shibley, former Editorial Manager for Machinima, was having a discussion with fans (ranging from many different questions) on his Twitter. One in particular has gathered some buzz; the fact that Titanfall was once a timed exclusive for Xbox One. Therefore, that means that it was once meant to be released on the PlayStation 4. But now it’s been revealed that the game is solely an Xbox (and PC) exclusive.

 

The evidence is clear; Titanfall was meant to go multi-platform. But that begs the question, “What happened?” After some digging, I found an article from Eurogamer from around the time of E3 that seems to sing a conflicting tune. What I mean by that is the Lead Artist of Respawn Entertainment, Joel Emslie, had the following to say when asked if Titanfall will ever be released on PlayStation:

It’s definitely not out of the question. We have a huge appreciation for the fans. Coming out and showing it to everybody, we’re super nervous and wanted to make sure everybody loved it. We love all our fans, whatever console they support.

So that means that Respawn Entertainment had no qualms about making the game multi-platform. So you can rule out Respawn being the cause of this sudden exclusivity. If it wasn’t Respawn, then who was it? Well, in the same article, Executive Vice President of the EA Games Label, Patrick Söderlund, made some fairly questionable comments.

Obviously a business relationship between Electronic Arts, Respawn and Microsoft led to this. There are always reasons for that, but we can’t go into them.

And then when he was asked about his perspective on Titanfall coming to PlayStation after this timed-exclusivity concluded, he stated:

We haven’t communicated anything on that, and I can’t comment on that right now. We’re proud to be exclusive to Xbox.

That’s a pretty powerful statement to make. One may even view that as EA and Microsoft cut a deal to make sure that Titanfall remained an Xbox exclusive. However, I may be reading too much into his comment; but stating that they’re “proud to be exclusive to Xbox,” makes it seem that much more curious. The fact that they “hadn’t communicated…on that” is odd considering in a blog posting from Respawn’s Jon Shiring, he stated that they did, in fact, speak with Sony about the game being released on the PlayStation as well, but they didn’t quite have what they were looking for.

I personally talked to both Microsoft and Sony and explained that we need to find a way to have potentially hundreds-of-thousands of dedicated servers at a price point that you can’t get right now. Microsoft realized that player-hosted servers are actually holding back online gaming and that this is something that they could help solve, and ran full-speed with this idea.

None of this means that Respawn Entertainment actually wanted the game to be an exclusive. Vince Zampella of Respawn expressed sadness over the exclusivity itself but also said that Titanfall 2 has a chance of coming to PlayStation consoles via his Twitter.

 

 

Unfortunately, PlayStation fans won’t be able to get their hands on Titanfall. But at least Vince has given us something to look forward to in the future with the possibility of a Titanfall 2 coming our way. It’s terrible that Respawn got caught up in the world of business in such a way with unwanted exclusivity. Hopefully the next time around they can make the game they want on all the consoles they want.