At the recent Xbox Showcase event, we saw Microsoft going back to making several of their games exclusives for their consoles including the hotly anticipated Gears of War: E-Day. And now, in an interview with Gamertag Radio, Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty, has laid out Microsoft’s approach towards exclusives moving forward.
“Our big multiplayer games [and] live-service games are going to continue to be multiplatform.”
“We want people to have a reason to get on board with Xbox,” he added. “We want them to have a reason to buy an Xbox. A reason to be an Xbox fan. At the same time, we want to reward all of our players who have been with us for a long time … we know that exclusives are important.”
“If we promised something to players, we’re going to honor that promise,” Booty said.
Microsoft’s move is similar to Sony’s who also recently made their single-player focused titles totally exclusive to their platform, however, although both companies are looking to make you buy their consoles, there’s some concerns as to whether the majority of players will be swayed to buy either the PS5 or the Xbox Series X|S after all. Firstly, all the consoles right now don’t really offer much bang for your buck in terms of gaming mainly cause of the limitations of their hardware–you can easily get a gaming PC at the price you need to pay for a console which can provide you much greater range of experiences than the consoles can, especially after over 5 years of their releases.
Even the promise of a few games may not be enough for most players to buy a console at this point of time in their current lifecycle–we already have news of the next gen PS6 and Xbox Project Helix at the works, so from that perspective, getting players to buy a new PS5 or an Xbox Series X|S at this point may prove to be a tall order, for both Sony and Microsoft.
