Figuring out which upcoming Xbox games will be console exclusive hasn’t been totally clear so far, but in an interview with GamesRadar+, CCO Matt Booty says fans shouldn’t expect all single-player games to be locked down either.
After slowly shipping many of its formerly exclusive games across the multiplatform pond, Xbox recently announced a return to exclusivity. Gears of War: E-Day will only be available on Xbox Series X|S and PC when it launches later this year, as will Clockwork Revolution when it drops sometime next year, with more to come in the future.
But not every game coming out of Xbox Game Studios, Bethesda, and Activision Blizzard will follow suit. Minecraft Dungeons 2 and Grounded 2 are both hitting other systems later this year, and chief strategy officer Matthew Ball tells us that “large live-service titles” will also be multiplatform moving forward as well.
If big multiplatform games are launching everywhere, then some fans might reasonably expect signature single-player games to remain Xbox exclusive. Speaking to GamesRadar+ about Xbox’s messy return to exclusives, Matt Booty explains that’s not necessarily the case: “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.”
Asked about how the company decides what’s exclusive and what’s not, then, Booty says “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 was a little more frank, saying he knows “this approach is not obvious to all of our players,” but the company is apparently “committed to making this clearer.”
Right now, Xbox’s strategy is to not announce platforms until a game is closer to shipping. Hopefully the firm removes some of that guesswork in the future.
For now, we know marque multiplayer games will try to attract eyeballs from everywhere, so expect future Call of Duties to remain available on rival consoles. The fate of single-player games, such as Hideo Kojima’s OD or The Elder Scrolls 6, remains up in the air, however.
With so much in flux, check out every studio Xbox owns and what they’re making.
Leave a Reply