41% of Gamers Buy Consoles for Exclusives, Down From 49%

An eight-point drop in a single year is hard to ignore. Circana's Q1 2026 Future of Video Games consumer survey, covering 2,500 active US players aged 13 and up, found that 41% of console gamers say they choose their platform because of exclusive games. That's down from 49% in Q1 2025. The runner-up reason, friends and family playing on the same console, sits at 38%. Easier multiplayer with friends (37%), preferring a casual living-room setup (36%), and access to physical games (24%) round out the top five.

What jumps out to me isn't that exclusives still lead; it's how tight the top four answers have become. Three percentage points separate "I'm here for the exclusives" from "I'm here because my mates are." That's barely a gap, and the trend line is moving in one direction. Circana's Mat Piscatella acknowledged on Bluesky that the survey "obviously isn't the whole story," later adding that "the real answer is that everything matters."

The timing lines up neatly with both Sony and Microsoft reportedly rethinking their porting strategies. Chris Dring at The Game Business pointed out that while exclusives like God of War Ragnarok drove massive PS5 hardware spikes at launch, Steam ports of those same games haven't sold in huge numbers. Meanwhile, Xbox's Starfield reportedly moved around 200k copies on PS5. If your exclusives don't sell well elsewhere and your own audience is increasingly motivated by social ecosystems rather than exclusive software, the calculus on porting changes fast.

Look at Circana's weekly engagement tracker and the most-played games on PlayStation and Xbox are almost entirely cross-platform: Fortnite, Roblox, Call of Duty, NBA 2K. The games people actually spend their hours in aren't exclusives at all. Exclusives sell hardware in launch windows, but social inertia and live-service habits keep people on a platform long after. Sony and Microsoft pulling back on ports might protect short-term hardware sales, but the data suggests the moat they're defending is getting shallower every year.