The Console Wars have mostly been fought with each company’s exclusives, and admittedly PlayStation has been kicking Xbox’s ass with their AAA titles like God of War, The Last of Us, and Spider-Man.
With recent acquisitions of studios like Bethesda and Blizzard, fans thought Xbox would offer some high-end exclusives, but rumor has it that this won’t be the case for Microsoft moving forward.
Xbox No Longer Making Exclusives?
According to Windows Central editor Jez Corden, Xbox will avoid exclusives in the future.
At best, it will launch ‘timed exclusives’—games that will be available on Xbox for a limited time and then released on other platforms after a year or so.
Of course, a lot of fans had questions after this was posted. Some are assuming that this would be a disastrous move on Microsoft’s part, but Corden followed up the post by saying, “If some games are exclusive, it's gonna be incidental at best; the "case by case" argument is by and large going to be multiplat, timed, and with maybe a few (very few) outliers.”
Since there hasn’t been an official announcement, it’s best to take this news with a grain of salt. However, given recent trends, timed exclusives seem to be slowly becoming the norm—even with platforms like PlayStation.
The Evolution of Exclusives
Exclusives work by having games that can only be played on a specific platform. The idea is that the games will entice the player to purchase a new console to play them.
PlayStation has been winning on the exclusive end. While fans were expecting Xbox to finally come up with some great titles after some big studio acquisitions—it looks like they’re giving up on that idea if they’re eventually going to release multi-platform games.
If anything, some players have been saying that the concept of exclusives has been ‘anti-consumer’ and studios would be set to earn more if their games were available to play on multiple platforms.
Recently with PlayStation, the model seems to be ‘timed exclusives’; in a sense that a title would only be available to PlayStation for a year or so, before eventually launching in other platforms. That happened with the PC ports of Death Stranding, Horizon Zero Dawn, and The Last of Us.
On the Xbox side, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was released for PC and Xbox Series X|S, but the game is expected to launch for the PS5 next year.
Set in Stone
Again, nothing has been officially confirmed, but if PlayStation will be doing timed exclusives, maybe that’s what the new norm will be moving forward.
With only the Game Pass as Xbox's main hook, Microsoft's openness about the state of its exclusives could be a way to set an example for rival game studios.
Fans will just have to wait and see until the next Xbox showcase before they can know what Microsoft is cooking regarding brand exclusivity.