When you think of a console, you are most likely to think of its most emblematic games: the Dreamcast had Soul Caliber, the XBox had Halo, the 360 has Gears of War. These games have something in common other than all being exemplary games – they were all hardware exclusives – at least for a while.

The flip side of it, of course, is that the developers of these titles are heavily incentivized NOT to have an exclusive game — unless they’re guarunteed to be as emblematic as Gears of War. For the most part, we want our games on as many platforms as possible. The 3 big companies want to fund games, but only want to fund exclusives. When I was running a startup, we actually walked away from a deal with Microsoft because they wanted our MMO to be an MS exclusive (not even a PC Port!) but weren’t willing to pay us the difference. “The difference” looked like the difference between a thin but healthy profit, and being in indentured servitude.

Exclusivity has heavily colored this generation of console wars. The Wii Remote is cool to the consumer as a toy, but to the Nintendo organization, it makes almost every game an exclusive. Games such as Madden ship the same game with entirely different control schemes, which makes each one a novelty, worth trying again. And games that hope to truly take advantage of Wii’s unique controller either can’t ship on other consoles, or do so with a truly inferior control scheme (akin to playing a bad PC port of a console game – I’m looking at you, FFO).

The 360 saw the problem of exclusivity and instead went straight into the teeth of the dragon. Achievements don’t provide exclusives – however, they provide an exclusive feature that 360 hopes will be the decision point that pushes you towards their platform over another. I know that, given the 5 consoles I own that could run the most recent Marvel Alliance game, Achievements was a bigger factor to me than next gen graphics.

Sony, on the other hand, seems adrift in the Exclusivity War. They are launching a trophy room in the fall which will compete with Achievements, but by then the Achievements system should have some serious traction. Also, they’re losing their emblematic Sony franchises: Devil May Cry 4, Guitar Hero II, and the new Katamari Damacy have all been announced as coming to the 360 in the near future. Grand Theft Auto IV is multiplatform as well. Each one of these is one fewer reason to shell out five hundred bucks for a console. Each of these is bad news for Sony.

A lot is riding on Final Fantasy XIII and Metal Gear Solid. If either of those games end up going multiplatform, expect it to be treated like the apocalypse. Right now, Sony executives have to be kicking themselves for putting God of War II on the console that everyone already owns.