Are exclusive games a risk?

So with the recent announcement from Gamescom that Rise of the Tomb Raider (What a stupid name) will be an Xbox One exclusive, a lot of people have been raising questions about this, more than anything is why this game is an Xbox exclusive when the previous instalment was cross-platform? Well it's simple, Xbox has paid Square Enix a large sum of money to release the game for Xbox only, the reason why Square Enix accepted this is because the previous instalment under performed apparently, despite selling nearly seven million copies, so this is where a lot of people are puzzled. The game underperformed so you're now going to ignore 2/3 of your potential audience by leaving PlayStation and PC gamers high and dry? Yes from that perspective it does seem to be a bad move, but then when you dive into the economics of it all. Microsoft purchasing a franchise like Tomb Raider is going to cost a lot of money that then goes to Square Enix, and not to mention manufacturing the product is considerably cheaper by only producing 1/3 of the original product, so as long as the Xbox version still turns a profit and the Microsoft money helps them break-even with the money they would have made with Playstation and PC then this will have been a successful move, risky, but successful. While for Microsoft, Xbox One hasn't sold as well as PS4 so having a big name like Tomb Raider will hopefully be a game good enough to buy a console, so it's a win-win situation.

But a lot of people have been skeptical about how long this product will be an exclusive, after all this wouldn't be the first product that was initially an exclusive turned cross-platform *cough* Mass Effect *cough* and Square Enix isn't a first party developer, in fact very few Microsoft first party developers become massively successful, especially in comparison to Sony, so we will most likely see this game come to Playstation and PC (almost guaranteed a PC version eventually) within a few months of initial release.

-Danny