Perhaps the biggest highlight of this year’s Xbox Showcase event was the platform’s return to exclusives with the upcoming Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution, taking the brand to their earlier years. And recently, Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball and chief content officer Matt Booty have stated that there will be even more Xbox exclusives in the near future as in a new interview with GamesRadar, the former said:
“I can assure you, Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution are not the only titles we’re planning,” Ball confirmed. “To grow a platform like ours, you have to have exclusive games and services. These are not going to be the only two titles.”
The execs also stated that the newer Xbox exclusives wouldn’t necessarily be single-player titles: “I wouldn’t overly fixate on single-player. I think that’s a good rule of thumb, but it certainly isn’t something that’s carved in stone”, Booty said.
“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.”
Ball also clarified that Microsoft has “a framework for these selections, including how we evaluate them” and the strategy may not be “obvious to all of our players,” while also saying the Xbox team is “committed to making this clearer,” which means we could be getting more official info regarding exclusives at some point this year.
Microsoft’s move is kind of 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, the current-gen 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.
