Matt Booty has explained Microsoft’s contradictory commitments for video game exclusives on Xbox.
Xbox’s president of gaming content and studios talked about this in a new interview with Variety. Here’s what Matt said:
“We are absolutely committed to having launch exclusives on Xbox. You know, it’s part of our core promise. And, we want to continue to bring our games to more players on more devices moving forward.
And we certainly have a lot of experience with that, with things that have historically been on multiplatform for so long.”
Just before this statement, Matt had been alluding to the success Sea of Thieves found when it was ported to PlayStation 5. In the same seemingly contradictory way, Sea of Thieves’ success on PlayStation 5, led to more people buying and playing it on Steam and Xbox Series X and S.
Furthermore, seemingly breaking the common narrative around loyal console gamers, Sea of Thieves players were eager to play with each other across all these platforms. Seemingly, if you talked to Sea of Thieves players, the console wars were already over.
There are several ways to take this statement, and perhaps the fitting analogy is to Sea of Thieves itself. What Matt may mean is that Microsoft will always launch their first party games on Xbox and PC first, and then bring those games to PlayStation 5, and maybe Nintendo’s platforms, afterwards.
Except, that interpretation could be completely off base. Matt may not mean that Xbox exclusives are only exclusives for as long as when those games launch. And, it doesn’t match Phil Spencer’s statement that Microsoft doesn’t do ‘slimy’ platform things like force gamers to choose between platforms when they make their games multiplatform.
So maybe Matt means something else. Maybe what he means is that there are different games that they will make exclusive to Xbox, and different games that they will make for the purpose of making them multiplatform.
If that’s the case, than it sounds like those Xbox games that were made to be single player, or primarily have a single player mode overs its multiplayer modes, those will continue to be exclusive to Xbox. There are certainly a lot of ‘legacy’ and upcoming Xbox games that would fit that description, from Avowed to Fable to South of Midnight.
And games that make sense to stay multiplatform, would be the games based on legacy IPs made by Activision and Zenimax that were multiplatform before Microsoft acquired them. And this would also be the case for live service games that thrive on being multiplatform, and building huge player bases, like Sea of Thieves.
Of course, that still raises questions, on where do games like Gears of War: E-Day, and perhaps the Forza racing series fall under? Those IPs certainly benefit from online multiplayer, would they be up for consideration?
But even as we raise these questions, we should recognize that Microsoft holds all the keys, and Sony fans shouldn’t feel too comfortable that they just received another third party now. After all, they may wait ten years and not get a game like Gears of War: E-Day on PlayStation 5, or PlayStation 6, at all.
Will Sony fans feel that they were fooled if that comes to pass? Because that’s not a promise Microsoft made at all. Perhaps those gamers should buy it on PC when it launches so they don’t miss out, if they were genuinely interested.
Matt Boot’s statement still leaves a lot of questions open, but that doesn’t mean everything is over for Xbox. On the contrary, they may have found a path that other companies will be forced to follow, if Microsoft finds the success that they believe is waiting for them there.
