Xbox has had a strange February. The console giant was likely planning to update the public on its future strategy in some form regardless, but rumours that major exclusives would be ported to other platforms forced its hand in a way we haven’t seen before. Last week, in a which was clearly scripted and lacking any natural banter, Phil Spencer, Matt Booty, and a cou𒈔ple of other prominent Xbox figures sat down to talk about the future of the platform.
While it also talked about future hardware, growing communities, and the genera♒l climate of Xbox Game Pass and its wider business strategies, everyone was turning up to this podcast to hear about exclusives. After spending billions acquiring studios and properties in historic mergers like Bethesda and Activision Blizzard King, there was a belief that Xbox was gearing up to dominate the market with marquee exclusives. With its new talent, there would soon come a time when the platf♕orm was known for more than the likes of Halo, Forza, and Fable. But after the muted response to Starfield and the harsh truth of modern production cycles, this promise is likely to go unfulfilled.
The podcast began with Phil Spencer confirming that four 🤪exclusive games will be coming to riva🐎l platforms in the months and years to come. He refused to name them, saying that plans are already in place at studios to market these titles൲ at the right time and place. He also said that these games aren’t massive 🐼blockbusters like Halo and Starfield, and instead are smaller in scope or titles that benefit from larger community engagement.
Shortly after the podcast was uploaded, a repo🦄rt from stated that the four games will be Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, Sea of Thieves, and Grounded. A reasonable quartet which will expose lesser known games to larger audiences and extend the lifespan o꧃f two service titles already long in the tooth.
I’ve no doubt that Xbox is using this strategy as a testing bed for future releases on other platforms, since rumours are already circulating that Indiana Jones and The Great Circle will be joining them. All of these games are available on Xbox Gam꧋e Pass for a monthly price, or you can purchase them outright. Millions of people have Game Pass on Xbox or PC, but so many more are playing on Nintendo Switch or PS5 and will never touch them. Spencer has said in the past that even Starfield won’t have average joes marching to the store to pick up an Xbox Series X, especially as Sony continues to roll out blockbuster exclusives that keep on dominating the conversation.
The time for Xbox to catch up and compete has passed, so it needs to change the surrounding conversation entirely. Exclusives matter to PlayStation, but to Xbox, what these massive titles used to represent has evolved in the face of failure, in the pursuit of a service-based ecosystem where every screen you own is a potential portal into all things Xbox. From that perspective, confining certain games to a singular device doesn’t make sense, and neither does entrapping your own titles to that ecosystem. It goes against a central message of ensuring all of its gameཧs are available to everyone, even if it means to do the unthin🦄kable and allow past exclusives to shine on rival platforms.
PlayStation has developed a strategy that works right now, but with Sony recently confirming that it doesn’t plan to release any new first-🃏party titles until 2025, it’s a matter of time until this becomes unsusꩲtainable.
Following the breakout success of Helldivers 2, Spencer once again noted that skipping out on Xbox doesn’t🔜 serve anyone, and only serves to alienate a decent percentage of✨ folks that are desperate to jump into this viral sensation but simply can’t. An Xbox version may result in more players, more profits, and more longevity. But as the chief of a platform which is currently being left out to dry, of course Spencer would express this argument.
He’s got a point though, and leaving exclusives behind feels like the right path forward in a world where how we access our favourite games is changing each and every day, with crossplay, saves, and purchases counting across myriad platforms meaning more and more. To confine ourselves merely to remain loyal to a particular brand is ridiculous, and the only reason to keep doing so is capitalism. PlayStation has developed a strategy that works right now, but with Sony recently confirming that it doesn’t plan to release aꦐny new first-party titles until 2025, it’s a matter of time un♏til this becomes unsustainable. This is 𝓀partly why Xbox is changing.
Xbox Game Pass is a steal, but I can’t imagine it helps Microsoft’s bottom line. Games like Starfield, Halo Infini♊te, and Forza Motorsport cost millions to produce and years to develop, and throwing them onto a subscription service immediately lessens their value before turning them into conversational topics that fall out of the zeitgeist within weeks. We have begun to view them as lesser, and I can’t imagine that pleases executives in a boardroom who are staring at spreadsheets highlighting a distinct lack of profits. With a lot of numbers to make up, porting its exclusive libraries to platforms not belonging to them at a premium was only a matter of time. Game Pass is still an option, but it changes the optics we have developed for Xbox over the past several years.
Times are changing, and I hope the medium is maturing beyond the need for console wars and blockbuster exclusives, which only exis🅘t to sow division and expand profit margins. It will benefit Xbox to change the public perception of exclusives and its own library, even if it means eventually leaving hardware behind and following in the footsteps of others. Nothing is go꧂ing to change the tide right now, and thus Xbox needs to establish a new normal where we don’t immediately associate consoles with big games you can’t find anywhere else. How it will shape out remains to be seen, but it feels like a move in the right direction for all of us.
