There was a spot of confusion when Xbox CEO Asha Sharma declared during the recent Xbox Games Showcase that Gears of War: E-Day is an “Xbox console exclusive.” What, we wondered, does that mean for us when it’s said by Xbox’s new management? In a new interview with GameInformer, Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty laid it out: The strategy is all about hosing PlayStation.
Okay, he didn’t say that in so many words, but that’s clearly the intent. “When we say ‘console exclusives,’ it means Xbox console,” Booty said. “It’ll still show up on all the normal places where we sell the PC version, and our cloud. Wherever you can get Xbox Cloud streaming.”
So the pullback is less about “only on Xbox!” and more “not on PlayStation!” which isn’t quite the same thing, but does square with Sharma’s admission in April—more of a reminder, really—that “our presence on PC isn’t strong enough.” And since PC gaming is dominated by Windows, made by the company that also makes Xbox, there’s a synergy between platforms that Sony just doesn’t have—which helps explain why PlayStation would actually embrace non-presence on PC as a feature, not a bug.
All of this matters because in the actually-not-very-long-ago times, exclusivity was the bane of PC gaming. A huge number of great PC games debuted first on one Xbox console or another—Halo, Fable, Alan Wake, Gears of War, Jade Empire, KOTOR, and Mass Effect, to name a handful—and took months or even years to come to PC. And it sucked!
Microsoft eventually seemed to figure out that it was leaving money on the table, but so did Sony—until it decided, I guess, that PlayStation or nothing is actually more lucrative in the long run. So when Microsoft started rumbling about a return to exclusives, I think it’s very understandable that a lot of us would start getting that ol’ CJ feeling:
Confusing matters further, the Xbox exclusives strategy is still very fluid: The new Gears is exclusive, for example, but Halo: Campaign Evolved—an even bigger name in the Xbox pantheon—is not.
“We’re the number two publisher in the world and in order to be a great publisher, you must have your games reach large audiences to play,” Sharma said in a recent Bloomberg interview. “At the same time, we’re increasingly becoming a platform. In order to be a platform, you must have exclusive content and services. And so, we’re looking at that very closely. I think that we have to be very thoughtful about each title on how we want to think about it and learn from similar cases in the industry, and that’s what we’re doing.”
I can’t say that really clarifies the situation for me, so it’s nice to have Booty putting it in simpler terms.
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