Insider Claims Xbox May Return to Console Exclusives, Following Sony’s Similar Move

Earlier this year, it was revealed that Sony would be largely stepping away from porting its first-party games to PC, returning to console exclusives for its single-player games and only releasing multiplayer games across different platforms. Now, it seems as though Microsoft may be plotting or is at least considering a similar maneuver for its first-party Xbox Game Studios games. This is according to industry insider, Jez Cordon, on the Xbox Two Podcast. According to Corden, “there are very very very big discussions happening about the exclusivity stuff” internally at Microsoft. Corden goes on to explain that, despite Microsoft’s recent moves away from platform exclusives, it recognizes the value in exclusive games—that is to say the value in keeping users largely locked into your gaming platform as opposed to being mostly a publishing and game development company.

Corden continues with a prediction that Microsoft will continue its shift away from Xbox gaming hardware—especially if it decides to move away from the platform approach and lean further into its game publishing business. Currently, the Xbox Helix is on the horizon, which is a hybrid game console that will run both PC and Xbox games, but that doesn’t necessarily preclude Microsoft from launching exclusives; it just means that the exclusives would be PC and Xbox exclusives. This convergence of PC and Xbox has been echoed by other rumors that Microsoft may be combining Xbox and PC Game Pass subscriptions into one unified subscription service.