Xbox Chief Strategy Officer Matthew Ball has given more insight into the firm’s new commitment to platform exclusives, following the announcement yesterday that both Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution would not be available on non-Xbox platforms.
Speaking at a live recording of The Game Business, Ball said that announcing the policy with two games was important. “We could have announced Clockwork was going to be exclusive later,” he said. “We could have kicked off 2027 by talking about that as an exclusive. It was important for us to include two titles so that people understood this was not a one-off… we were not saying it’s our 25th anniversary, it’s Gear’s 20th anniversary, we’re returning to Xbox, here’s an exclusive.”
Ball said that the announcement was “the start of a program,” and that “players can expect a reliable pipeline that validates their historical investment in the Xbox platform, keeps them as Xbox players going forward and everyone in the industry understands that exclusives are important to the growth and branding of that platform.”
“We’ve also said publicly that there’s a series of titles – predominantly those that are designed for large live service multiplayer platforms, CoD being the biggest – are going to remain non-exclusive. We have a third bucket of titles, those titles that we have previously announced or previously committed with our partners, with players, with teams, that we’ve decided to maintain those commitments.”
When asked, Ball wouldn’t comment on whether the new Hellblade title Senua, which was revealed at the Xbox showcase with confirmation it would ship on PS5, fell into the latter category. He described the refocus on exclusives as “turning around the business”. “Asha [Sharma] has been clear that our business today is not healthy,” he said.
Ball said the firm was not yet able to give a comprehensive answer on exclusive titles and the rationale behind their selection, but that “we know what those are going to be. We know how we’re going to make those decisions. We know how we’re going to be evaluated against those decisions. But what’s important there is, that framework has to be external eventually.”
“We have to communicate that internally. We have to communicate that to our partners, but then most of all, at the end of the day, the average player,” he said, saying that both current and future players need “to understand it very simply. That’s where we’re going. We’re just not ready to do it yet.”
