Things are shaking up violently over at Xbox land, what with the new leader of the division doing a major reset. One part of this is laying off a total of 3,200 workers over the course of the fiscal year, as well as letting go of four studios, fortunately without shutting them down. Another is going back to exclusives. And according to Chief Strategy Officer Matthew Ball and Chief Content Officer Matt Booty, these will not be timed console exclusives; the Xbox will be the only console to get these games.
In an interview with GamesRadar+, the two execs say that “Gears of War: E Day and Clockwork Revolution are just the first” on the list of Xbox exclusives that are on the way. They also say that there is a need for “a reliable pipeline of exclusive games” for Xbox to be back on track for consistent growth. That, and there are “no plans to back away from a return to console exclusivity following the restructure. Some games will still be multiplatform, including live service titles, as well as those that were already promised to be multiplatform prior to the reset.
This would have been fair a few years ago, before Microsoft started spending big bucks on studio and publisher acquisitions. Now though, whenever someone from Xbox says console exclusive, there will always be a worry that the brand will be turning something that’s previously multiplatform into its own exclusive. This would be especially the case for markets including Malaysia where the Microsoft videogames division does not have an official presence.
The silver lining is that, if the upcoming Project Helix is any indication, while these games will be exclusive to the Xbox on the console side of things, chances are they will still be available on PC. After all, the machine was officially described as something that can play Xbox and PC games. If not, then we can only hope that only Xbox Game Studios titles will be locked behind the console exclusivity, and not games by traditionally multiplatform studios before they got acquired.
(Source: GamesRadar+)
