Former Blizzard President Calls Out Xbox For Losing Exclusivity Battle

Microsoft’s Xbox team has been making changes lately with their exclusive line. We’ve seen a ton of concerned players wondering what the future of Xbox might be when they unveiled a few of their catalog titles would jump ship towards competitive platforms. While the Xbox team tried to calm tempers by suggesting that some bigger title hits wouldn’t follow the same trend, we just recently learned the Indiana Jones game will also arrive on PlayStation 5. The former Blizzard president has had enough and voiced their opinion online.

Taking to X’s social media account, former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra voiced frustration over Microsoft’s Xbox team. On X, Mike Ybarra noted that if you want to win the living room, you will need exclusive hits. Winning, in his eyes, means not only having a platform but also the exclusive games that will run on it. As a result, Mike feels that Sony knows how to make hits, and that is why they are thriving.

Mike went on to urge Xbox to double down on exclusives. Whether Microsoft will heed his advice remains to be seen. After all, as we mentioned, one of the big exclusives Microsoft Xbox fans were waiting on was Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. That game is in the works at MachineGames and is slated to launch this December 9, 2024. While we initially believed this would be an Xbox Series X/S and PC exclusive, we learned earlier this month that this is just a timed console exclusive. Instead, a PlayStation 5 version of the game would be arriving sometime in Spring of 2025.

We’re not sure just what the future outlook is for Xbox. Perhaps even more first-party games would arrive on competitive platforms, making it more appealing to jump on the PlayStation console if some of these games are just going to land on it. But then you also have Xbox Game Pass, which grants you access to the first-party lineup for a monthly fee. Players can even use an Amazon Fire Stick to gain cloud access to the Xbox Game Pass, leaving consumers to avoid having an Xbox console altogether.