Console exclusives are nothing new in the video game industry. You can’t play a Super Mario game on Xbox and you can’t play Gears Of War on the Wii. Although that trend seems to be changing these days, with previously PlayStation-exclusive titles like the Metal Gear series branching out, it looks we’re soon going to be seeing the console makers set themselves apart from the competition in another way: Exclusive TV shows.
According to Deadline, Sony has just announced that Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming’s comic series Powers will be coming to PlayStation as an hourlong drama series billed as the game console’s first original show. Presumably that’s because Sony is hoping people have forgotten about The Tester, a reality show in which video game fans competed to earn a job as a quality assurance tester (the most glamorous and exciting job in the industry). The Tester was only available on Sony’s PlayStation Network (through the PlayStation 3) as well as Crackle, but it sounds like Sony is being a little vague on how the exclusivity for Powers will work—whether that means it will only be on Sony’s console or also available somewhere on the internet.
A TV show version of Powers—which tells the story of two regular police officers trying to do their jobs in a world full of superheroes—has been in the works for several years now, including adaptations for FX that fell through. Deadline says this will be a “brand new take” on the comic, which is always welcome news for comic book fans already attached to the existing material, but that could simply mean that it will be unrelated to attempts that came before. Either way, Bendis and Oeming are signed on as executive producers, so that’s probably actual good news.