The creative director of Splinter Cell: Conviction said today that there’s nothing stopping future installments from appearing on the PlayStation 3 even though Conviction won’t appear on the platform. Depending on what the platform holders do, Conviction could be looked back on as an anomaly among the Tom Clancy games.
Edge Online asked Max Beland whether any possibility existed for Splinter Cell games to return to PlayStation. “I don’t see why it wouldn’t,” Beland answered. “There’s no reason why Splinter Cell couldn’t be on the PS3.”
Beland immediately said that this possibility does not include Conviction. “Conviction? No, because of the exclusivity deal. I know people keep talking about maybe, maybe not, [but] at Ubisoft Montreal I haven’t seen anyone working on PS3 for Conviction.”
Conviction is exclusive to Microsoft platforms purely for business reasons, and Beland said that he doesn’t have a hand in those matters. “I’m not involved in the business deals. I joined Splinter Cell after the exclusivity deal with Microsoft had already been signed.”
The main reason future Splinter Cell games are possible on PS3 right now is because no one has approached Ubisoft about exclusivity yet. “[The next game] is open to new deals,” Beland said. “If Microsoft wants an exclusivity deal, they don’t call me, it’s Yves [Guillemot, Ubisoft CEO] dealing with the business people.”
Beland even added that a PS3 exclusivity deal for future Splinter Cell games would be possible if Sony tried to make a deal. This however would be very uncharacteristic of the franchise. Just about all of the Tom Clancy games have basically been PC and Xbox games that were ported to competing platforms.
The original Splinter Cell launched on Xbox in November 2002, then on the PS2 and Gamecube the following spring with technical sacrifices. Even though Pandora Tomorrow and Chaos Theory launched multiplatform, content was cut from the PlayStation and Nintendo versions. The PS3 port of Double Agent, though content-identical to the Xbox 360 original, still made technical sacrifices.
Despite the Tom Clancy franchise’s preference towards Xbox and PC however, any real exclusivity to anything would still be unusual.
Splinter Cell: Conviction is the first Tom Clancy game in 12 years to be truly exclusive to Microsoft’s or anyone’s platforms. Since the original 1998 Rainbow Six, every Tom Clancy game has been multiplatform. Even though most of them have been superior on Xbox or PC, this is the first time Microsoft has actually come down on Ubisoft and made the exclusivity deal.
Sony probably doesn’t feel they need total exclusivity. Sony Computer Entertainment America’s Publisher Relations Senior Vice President told Edge last month that Microsoft does these deals because of their weak first party support – a weakness that Sony doesn’t have.
“Rather than putting their money behind [first party development], they’ve been going to Epic or Valve or BioWare to do what they did with Mass Effect,” Rob Dyer said. “Candidly, we’re not going to compete with Microsoft on that front.”
If Microsoft doesn’t make any more deals with Ubisoft, then the publisher will probably go back to business as usual – porting their games to as many platforms as possible.
