Rumor: Microsoft won’t have any true exclusives in the future

It’s not easy to make sense of Microsoft’s strategy right now. The sequel to a former PlayStation exclusive like Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II only came to PC and Xbox, while Indiana Jones and the Great Circle became a time exclusive and The Outer Worlds 2 is coming to Playstation on day one. Meanwhile, we have titles like Avowed and South of Midnight that both seem to be Xbox exclusives (at least for now).

There is no good rulebook, no clear policy, and more and more people are starting to question why they should buy into the Microsoft ecosystem.

Now, Windows Central editor Jez Corden writes via X that true exclusives are gone for good as far as Microsoft is concerned, and that from now on they will work with time exclusives at best. Corden’s opinions aren’t official, of course, but he’s shown himself to be on top of Microsoft many times before, and he also adds:

“If some games are exclusive it’s gonna be incidental at best, the “case by case” argument is by and large going to be multiplat, timed, and with maybe a few (very few) outliers.”

In a nutshell, it seems that Microsoft will, with very few exceptions, work with multiformat games going forward, where the exclusives that do exist are for a limited time. Assuming Corden is right, it will be interesting to see how this will affect the gaming community’s willingness to buy into their ecosystem, when they can get all their games and more via Steam or PlayStation, for example.

Microsoft has already flagged that they have new gaming hardware coming, both a portable unit and a very powerful console. But without exclusive games, we can imagine that they will be harder to sell, or what do you think?