By The words ‘Xbox exclusives’ haven’t been used that much in recent years, and now it seems that may be here to stay.
Windows Central, a news site for all things Microsoft, has done a big feature piece on Xbox’s strategy moving forward for the next decade and the site’s executive editor Jez Corden has posted on X some tweets that sum up the biggest takeaway of the piece.
Those tweets: “Xbox won’t have exclusives going forward. Everything is timed exclusive at most. If some games are exclusive it’s gonna be incidental at best, the ‘case by case’ argument is by and large going to be multiplatform, timed, and with maybe a few (very few) outliers.”
The comments follow Microsoft’s president of game content and studios Matt Booty indicating last month that exclusivity and windowing decisions are being made on a “game by game basis”.
As the new piece says, the games industry is in a crisis mode with mass publisher layoffs, studio closures, and decreased venture capital investment.
Xbox announced in February plans to bring a wave of games to PlayStation and Nintendo Switch with titles like “Pentiment,” “Hi-Fi Rush,” “Sea of Thieves” and “Grounded” making the jump earlier this year.
More recently some of Microsoft’s biggest upcoming titles that could’ve been exclusive are set to go multiplatform including “Doom: The Dark Ages” and “The Outer Worlds 2,” while the just released new “Indiana Jones” game will hit PS5 in the Spring.
Even the core Xbox exclusive trio of “Halo,” “Forza” and “Gears of War” are reportedly “not off the table”.
Despite all this, Microsoft has stated that it is seeing record users on Xbox consoles with AAA publishers still building games for the ecosystem. Even some titles that were previously PlayStation console exclusive (eg. “Death Stranding,” “Genshin Impact”) have come to Xbox with more slated in 2025.
The post Xbox Won’t Have Exclusives In Future? appeared first on Dark Horizons.
