‘Xbox won’t have exclusives going forward’, it’s been claimed

The days of Xbox exclusives are reportedly numbered.

That’s according to Windows Central executive editor Jez Corden, who discussed his understanding of Microsoft’s first-party strategy in a series of X posts this weekend.

“Xbox won’t have exclusives going forward. Everything is timed exclusive at most,” he claimed.

“If some games are exclusive it’s gonna be incidental at best, the ‘case by case’ argument is by and large going to be multiplat, timed, and with maybe a few (very few) outliers,” Corden later added.

And responding to a user who said they didn’t believe Xbox’s upcoming Fable game would come to PlayStation, Corden wrote: “That game was monstrously expensive. It might not be day one, but it’ll come with the current plan in place imo.”

Xbox first announced in February plans to bring a wave of games to PlayStation and Nintendo Switch, in what appeared to be a significant change of strategy, starting with Pentiment, Hi-Fi Rush, Sea of Thieves and Grounded.

Later, Microsoft announced Doom: The Dark Ages for Xbox Series X/S, PC, and PS5, and confirmed that a PS5 version of its Indiana Jones game will be released next year.

Last month, Microsoft’s gaming CEO Phil Spencer reiterated that the company won’t rule out any first-party Xbox game potentially coming to rival platforms such as PlayStation and Nintendo in the future.

Matt Booty, Microsoft’s president of game content and studios, also told Variety this month: “We are very much making the [exclusivity and windowing] decisions on a game by game basis. And each of our studios is in a little bit of a different position.

“There’s also the production timeline on a game, so the decision on spacing comes there first. We want to make sure there’s a great experience for our Xbox players, and then the gap between [when it becomes available on PlayStation] is as much a production decision as it is anything else.”