I mean the practice of buying exclusives away from your competitor.
Yes, they all have done and still do that. It's the job of a platform holder to build up a unique library to differentiate, just as it is the job of the platform holder to strategically protect their library from competitors. You can't blame the corporation who offered a contract to a developer/publisher and leave the one making the game as well the one losing the game out.
Nintendo, of course had a monopoly on 3rd parties with the NES that was broken up.
This lasted well into and throughout the SNES days, actually. It's why Sega and NEC had to settle for so many home-programmed conversions of otherwise locked-up titles for most of their console lifespans.
It was Sony with the Playstation that really started the practice. If not just buying an exclusive, then buying the studio that produced the game. People forget that Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, and Wipeout all appeared on the Saturn. The first games anyway.
Right, Sony has a long and pretty brutal history with moneyhats, the first true and serious moneyhatter in the industry. They also gutted/headhunted big teams of the early-mid 90s to build up their internal staff of gamemakers and people with connections, like Park Place Productions, who basically made Madden big. They bought Psygnosis and others, too.
They continued to do it to the Dreamcast (with an EA assist) to push them out. Ironic that it's rumored that EA is siding with MS this round.
Right. Also, they had plenty of exclusives or timed ones, anyway, with Take-Two/Rockstar, with GTA series and others, Konami with Silent Hill/Suikoden/MGS, Square, Enix, Capcom, and much more. There was a strong collusion between Japanese developers and Japanese platforms, something that is much less alive today.
The Playstation brand wouldn't exist without the practice of buying up exclusives/studios. It shouldn't be frowned upon when MS uses the same tactics on Sony that Sony used to build themselves up.
Right. It's hypocritical, for certain.