Xbox Chief Strategy Officer Matthew Ball has stated that recent rumors of the platform reversing course on it’s newly announced exclusive titles (Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution) are completely false and there will be more exclusives in the coming years, so yes the exclusives are here to stay.
“These rumors are false. Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution will stay exclusive. There are no conversations and have been no conversations to “reverse course.” And as we said last week, players can continue to expect signature exclusives from us every year.”
Earlier, analyst Rhys Elliott of Alinea Analytics told Gamespot that the recently announced exclusives won’t yield great results for the Xbox, for several reasons:
“Console as we know it is over for Xbox–and has been for a while. There’s no turning that ship. But they still need to pretend to care until they’ve transitioned to pastures where they can return to growth (if they succeed),” he said.
“A Gears console exclusive does not shift meaningful numbers of Series X units. Exclusivity as a hardware-driver is over for them, because the install base it would drive simply isn’t responsive enough to justify the cost of building hardware at a 5x component premium. And those games are on Steam anyway,” he added.
Elliott also went on to say that both Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution are “sacrificial lambs for hearts-and-minds, not economics.”
“Xbox is pulling some games off PlayStation while keeping them on Steam, so they’re still adding to Steam’s value proposition while adding almost nothing to their own console’s,” he stated.
“I’m not sure how worth it the exclusivity change is in the long term–and I expect there to be some backtracking once the revenue numbers come in,” Elliott added. “If the data is any guide, the titles that stay Xbox-first or Xbox-only will mostly be the ones a sliver of the PlayStation audience would have bought anyway. So nobody is really losing sleep over that math.”
It seems Xbox will be going ahead with their current direction in terms of exclusivity and only time will tell whether it was worth it in the long run or not.
