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Xbox CEO Asha Sharma once again says the company is rethinking its approach to exclusivity, but what that actually means for games like Halo and Forza Horizon 6 remains unclear.
Asked about the console maker and publisher’s exclusivity plans during a Bloomberg Tech panel (below), Sharma calls it a “tough topic” since the company is stuck between wanting its games to reach as many people as possible and giving people a reason to buy into its platform.
“Look, we’re the number two publisher in the world, and in order to be a great publisher, you must have your games reach large audiences to play,” she explains. “At the same time, we’re increasingly becoming a platform. In order to be a platform, you must have exclusive content and services. And so, we’re looking at that very closely. I think that we have to be very thoughtful about each title, on how we want to think about it, and learn from similar cases in the industry, and that’s what we’re doing.”
For the past few years, Xbox has slowly been shipping its previously-exclusive first-party content to other shores. Even Halo: Campaign Evolved and Fable have PS5 ports in the pipeline, though that strategy was a leftover from former head Phil Spencer’s reign. On the other hand, upon taking charge, Sharma immediately said the company had to “reevaluate” its stance on exclusives.
Exclusives are also still undeniably a big reason as to why consoles sell, should the company still be serious about its hardware. Most recently, console exclusive Forza Horizon 6 led to a rare uptick in Xbox Series X|S sales in the UK, putting the struggling console within arms reach of the PS5’s numbers. Sony itself is also reportedly ending PC support for its single-player PlayStation games.
Still, PlayStation and Nintendo aren’t Xbox’s biggest rivals. At least, according to Sharma: “Honestly, I think our biggest competition is attention. Right now, the next generations’ number one thing they wanna do is play, so we’ve got that going for us, but the way that they consume is really different. They want it wherever they are, they want it in shorter bites, they want to be able to customize, they want an open ecosystem, they want a lot of different things than our core user base.”
The new Xbox boss then explains that the company’s in a good position with that audience because “we have the characters and the worlds and the technology to be the best in the world and serve who we’re serving, and we’re going to have to invent new things to serve the next generation.”