A couple of years ago, Microsoft started making most of its first-party games multiplatform. Now it’s taking some of those games and making them Xbox exclusives again. The whiplash between those two moves in only 24 months has left many fans confused and skeptical about just how committed the tech giant will stay to this latest shift in policy. Xbox is adamant that it’s not just a temporary experiment.
“I can assure you, Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution are not the only titles we’re planning,” Xbox chief strategist recently told GamesRadar. “To grow a platform like ours, you have to have exclusive games and services. These are not going to be the only two titles.” He added that those games are never coming to PS5. They “are not timed exclusives but permanent ones,” he said.
What will new Xbox exclusive number three be? While Ball reaffirmed that Microsoft will still make large live service multiplayer games multiplatform going forward to reach as many players as possible, that doesn’t mean non-multiplayer games will automatically be exclusive. “We have a framework for these selections, including how we evaluate them,” Ball said. “I recognize that this approach is not obvious to all of our players, and we are committed to making this clearer.”
Chief content officer Matt Booty tried to elaborate. “I wouldn’t overly fixate on single-player,” he said. “I think that’s a good rule of thumb, but it certainly isn’t something that’s carved in stone.” Booty added, “We are the stewards of over 20 game franchises that have made a billion dollars in their lifetime. There are a lot of different games in our portfolio, and we have to think about how different games serve different purposes within it.”
It sounds a lot like “the plan’s the plan until it’s not the plan.”
Single-player games like Halo: Campaign Evolved and Fable are still coming to PS5, the latter of which doesn’t arrive until early 2027, at the end of new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma’s first year. What’s the deal there? “We have titles where we have made a commitment to our partners and to our players that they were going to be multiplatform,” Ball said. “We will be respecting this commitment.”
Booty added, “While we’re looking to be nimble, and it’s fantastic to have the energy that’s come with Asha’s new leadership, we’ve also got projects that have been in the works for a long time. We have to hit the right balance between the work that the teams have invested and a strategy pivot.”
Xbox’s new line about needing exclusives to give players a reason to own an Xbox is hard to argue with. But it also spent multiple console generations losing ground with a full slate of exclusive first-party games. It’s still unclear how a trickle of exclusive games per year will succeed in reversing that trend when a boatload of them could not. It also limits the audience for those chosen first-party games at a time when Xbox studios are facing mass layoffs for releases and franchises that underperformed.
“The number of players we can reach across PlayStation and Nintendo is absurd, so is now really the time to pull games away from those platforms?” one anonymous source within Xbox told GamesRadar. “I hope it works, but I’m unconvinced.”