‘The Idea of Locking It to One Store or One Device Is Antiquated for Most People’ — Xbox President Says Microsoft Is Seeing Players ‘Evolve Way Past’ Big, Blockbuster Exclusive Games
Microsoft has said the idea of a video game exclusive locked to a single storefront has become “antiquated for most people,” as the company soldiers on with its multiplatform push for Xbox games.
Xbox has left console exclusivity behind — in truth some years ago now — with most Xbox Game Studios published games releasing on platforms other than Xbox. Indeed, when Microsoft finally announced Playground’s Forza Horizon 6 and confirmed it would launch on PlayStation 5 after Xbox and PC, it came as a surprise. Nowadays, Xbox Game Studios is one of the most prolific and successful publishers on PlayStation.
Microsoft’s approach is in stark contrast to Nintendo and Sony’s. Nintendo has the most hardline policy on its games, releasing them on its consoles only. Sony has softened its approach in recent years, releasing the bulk of its games on PC after PlayStation (and in the case of Helldivers 2, eventually on Xbox). But Sony still refuses to launch its big single-player games on anything other than PlayStation day one (the latest example of this is Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Yotei).
Speaking to Mashable, Xbox president Sarah Bond pointed to the likes of Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft as evidence that the majority of gamers had moved on from exclusives.
“We’re really seeing people evolve way past that. The biggest games in the world are available everywhere,” she said. “You look at Call of Duty, you look at Minecraft, you look at Fortnite, you look at Roblox, that’s actually what’s really driving community in gaming. That’s where people gather. They have experiences. And the idea of locking it to one store or one device is antiquated for most people. You want to be able to play with your friends anywhere regardless of what they’re on.”
Microsoft’s stance on exclusives has become one of the biggest talking points in the Xbox community, and that conversation is ramping up again as the company begins to discuss in vague terms about its next-gen Xbox.
In the same interview, Bond suggested the next-gen Xbox console would be a console PC hybrid, and described it as “a very premium, very high-end curated experience.”
The comments come hot on the heels of the release of the ROG Xbox Ally X handheld, which costs $1,000. (In another interview, Bond said this and the less powerful, $600 ROG Ally are ultimately Asus-made handhelds — and because of this, Asus set the price.)
Xbox fans are now wincing at the thought of how expensive the next-gen console will be, particularly in the context of recent price rises to Xbox Game Pass and the Xbox Series X and S.
It now seems certain that it won’t come with any console exclusives.
“And we’re really leaning into that with this [ROG Xbox Ally X handheld] experience because it just opens up another way for you to play,” Bond continued. “As does cloud, as does PC, as does the consoles that we all own and have in our living room.”
One prominent critic of the exclusive is former president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment America Shawn Layden, who last year said that when a video game’s costs exceed $200 million, “exclusivity is your Achilles’ heel.”
“It reduces your addressable market,” Layden told GamesBeat, before citing the success of Arrowhead’s Helldivers 2, which launched on PlayStation 5 and PC to explosive success. “Particularly when you’re in the world of live service gaming or free-to-play. Another platform is just another way of opening the funnel, getting more people in. In a free-to-play world, as we know, 95% of those people will never spend a nickel. The business is all about conversion. You have to improve your odds by cracking the funnel open. Helldivers 2 has shown that for PlayStation, coming out on PC at the same time. Again, you get that funnel wider. You get more people in.”
Layden said single-player games have a similar audience consideration as multiplayer games, though not exactly the same. “For single-player games it’s not the same exigency,” he said. “But if you’re spending $250 million, you want to be able to sell it to as many people as possible, even if it’s just 10% more.”
Layden’s comments echo those of former Xbox boss Peter Moore, who in a recent interview with IGN suggested Microsoft will be debating internally whether to release Xbox poster-child Halo on PlayStation.
“If Microsoft says, wait, we’re doing $250 million on our own platforms, but if we then took Halo as, let’s call it a third-party, we could do a billion… You got to think long and hard about that, right?” Moore said. “I mean, you just got to go, yeah, should it be kept? It’s a piece of intellectual property. It’s bigger than just a game. And how do you leverage that? Those are the conversations that always happen with, how do you leverage it in everything that we would do?”
The video game console business is currently under increased scrutiny following mass layoffs and studio closures. Xbox boss Phil Spencer has explained Microsoft’s recent, devastating layoffs in terms of the industry’s failure to grow the gaming audience beyond the traditional console install base.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
