If Microsoft Abandons Exclusives, What Next For Xbox And For Players?

Yesterday, myself and two of the most esteemed gamers at TheGamer (Eric Switzer and George Foster) got together to chat about all things Xbox. You can check out the video above for our full thoughts, but for those of you who find George’s voice too grating (understandable), I’ll summarise our feelings and the ramifications from whatever happens next into three categories: how it impacts players, how it impacts Microsoft, and how it impacts gaming.

What Is Happening With Xbox

In case you’ve missed everything I’m talking about, Xbox could be about to change everything in gaming. Or maybe, nothing will happen. The truth is likely somewhere in between, and a lot closer to the former. What started a month ago as a rumour that Xbox exclusive Hi-Fi Rush would be coming to the Switch has snowballed into a complete upheaval of Xbox’s strategy, with Hi-Fi Rush not only rumoured to be coming to PS5 as well, but being joined by Sea of Thieves, Starfield, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

None of this has been confirmed by Xbox yet, but Phil Spencer has announced the company will do a conference next week to discuss everything. It’s unlikely we’ll get a complete denial - this would not take a week to set up - so we don’t yet know what comes next for Xbox. For now, we’re going to assume Xbox takes the nuclear option of abandoning exclusives as we know it, and discuss what that means for everyone. If the reality is less severe, we’ll still see some of these impacts anyway.

What Does Xbox’s Future Mean For Gamers?

By and large, exclusives are bad news. It means you need two (or three, with the Switch) expensive gaming consoles to play every video game. A future where you only need one console to play every video game - like only needing one DVD player to play every DVD - is better for the consumer.

Of course, things aren’t so simple. In the short term, it means some people chose to buy the machine with Starfield, and others chose to buy the machine with Spider-Man. If the Spider-Man machine has Starfield too, that first group will rightly feel hard done by. It’s easy, especially as press with more access to games and consoles, to mock those invested in this console war. And it’s true, some of them are ridiculous in their behaviour. But it’s natural to be disappointed in the Green Team if it shares its toys with the Blue Team and the Blue Team doesn’t do the same.

What Does This Mean For Microsoft?

As I alluded to above, it is odd how invested we are in the financial success of gaming companies despite literally not being invested monetarily. However, it is important to be aware of the business perspectives in cases like this. Though fans will be running the gamut of emotions, these decisions will be made coldly and without distraction. That doesn’t inherently make them good or bad, but they will not be swayed by sentiment.

The first thing to remember is that Microsoft is far bigger than Xbox, and across most of its business it deals in software rather than hardware. While there are Windows phones and the like, mostly what Microsoft does is put its Office or Outlook or any other dozen software programs onto machines made by other companies. This is what most gaming studios do as well, so while Sony (a hardware company) would need to swallow some humble pie to pull out of the console game, it’s just another day at the office (the Microsoft Office) for a company the size of Microsoft.

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Of course, even this nuclear option doesn’t see Xbox pull out of the console business altogether. Xbox is a huge brand with two decades of cultural saturation, and none of the rumours suggest it’s on the chopping block. If Xbox is out of the exclusives business though, it may be that Xboxes of the future offer cheaper consoles that exist mainly as Game Pass machines. An affordable entry into gaming while making a move that may shift the industry as a whole away from its skyrocketing development costs feels like altruistic genius, even if it will still sting for those who bought The Starfield Machine.

Since the advent of Game Pass, Xbox has been more interested in pulling you into its ecosystem over selling a console box, and this move may be betting on an all-digital future of cloud gaming where consoles themselves become less important and, eventually, redundant.

What Does Xbox’s Future Mean For Gaming?

Despite not being a gaming company primarily, Xbox has always been at the forefront of gaming changes. Perhaps because Microsoft sees the big picture in tech, it is better at predicting the future. Xbox Live, Xbox Arcade, Achievements, and Game Pass have all proven to be major innovations. Even the all in one entertainment system ideas of the Xbox One have been proven right by time, it just arrived a little early. As Eric argues, this is very different from Sega ducking out of consoles with Dreamcast. This may well be Xbox seeing where the wind is blowing and deciding that gaming’s present future is unsustainable (a point many people have put forward before), and therefore doing something drastic about it.

However, there’s a flip side to this that is important to discuss, and I suppose this could have gone in the Gamers section too. One of the reasons people like exclusives despite them being anti-consumer on the face value is the idea that they inspire competition. It would have taken the US longer to get to the moon if the Russians weren’t also trying. Maybe they wouldn’t have gotten there at all.

Of course, Sony and Nintendo are still both heavily into the exclusive business, and offer such different platforms these days that there’s a bit more justification for it. But assuming this does make Sony too powerful, that’s an almighty swing of the pendulum from the argument that spent a year in the courts last year that Microsoft would be too powerful with Activision Blizzard in its arsenal. Seeing how much Sony spends on its games, and how long they take to develop, the end of the space race might be for the better.

I think most people would take the deal that we get more releases from the series we love more often, no battle pass gimmicks shoved in there, and fewer layoffs across the industry, but games no longer take 100 hours and they don’t all look photorealistic. If the lack of competition inspires a cultural shift, it might be for the best. Quantity over quality is not usually a solid argument, but consistently enjoyable games over expensive, bloated behemoths every six years sounds like a good deal to me.

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