'Very Big Discussions' on Exclusives Rock Xbox Internally

For the past two years, Xbox's entire pitch has been simple: play our games wherever you want. Forza Horizon 5 on PlayStation. Starfield on PS5. Halo on the way. Now, according to Windows Central Executive Editor Jez Corden, the people running Xbox are seriously questioning whether that open-door approach was the right call.

Speaking on the latest episode of the Xbox Two podcast, Corden said there are "very, very, very big discussions about the exclusivity stuff going on right now" inside Microsoft. He framed the core tension as an identity crisis: "Do you want to be an ecosystem company first, or do you want to be a publishing company first?" His position is that Xbox can't be both. One path leads to a hardware-driven platform with games that pull people in; the other turns Xbox into a third-party publisher that happens to sell a console.

This is the contradiction I've been waiting for someone at Xbox to acknowledge. You can't spend billions acquiring Bethesda and Activision Blizzard, ship their biggest games on your competitor's hardware, and then wonder why consumers don't see a reason to buy your box. The multiplatform strategy made financial sense on a per-title basis. Forza Horizon 5 reportedly outsold several first-party PlayStation titles on PS5. But every one of those sales is also a person who just proved they don't need an Xbox. That's a trade-off, and it sounds like Asha Sharma's leadership team is finally weighing the long-term cost.

The Xbox 360 Ghost

Corden says the internal conversations keep circling back to the Xbox 360 era, and why that console succeeded. Exclusive franchises like Gears of War and Halo were system-sellers at a time when Sony stumbled with the PS3's price and Nintendo leaned hard into casual gaming with the Wii. The argument inside Microsoft, apparently, is that recapturing that kind of momentum would require a "concerted effort over years and years" of exclusive investment. I think that's exactly right, and it's also why this decision can't wait. If Xbox's next-generation hardware, codenamed Project Helix, launches without a clear exclusive lineup, no amount of course-correcting afterwards will fix the perception problem.

Corden was careful to draw a line on social media between what might go exclusive and what won't. Live-service and multiplayer-driven games like Call of Duty have "no chance of going exclusive," he said. But "some single-player stuff" could be locked to Xbox platforms in the future. That split makes sense. Pulling Call of Duty off PlayStation would be corporate suicide. But keeping a new single-player Bethesda RPG or a future Obsidian game off competing hardware? That's exactly how you give people a reason to buy in.

The timing here is interesting, too. Sony is reportedly pulling back from porting its own games to PC, which would signal a broader industry retreat from the "games everywhere" philosophy that defined the last few years. If both platform holders start hoarding their best single-player content again, the next console generation could look a lot more like the PS3/360 era than the current one. Whether that's good for players depends entirely on whether these companies use exclusivity to fund ambitious games or just to lock content behind a paywall.

Nothing has been confirmed publicly, and plenty of Xbox games are still scheduled to release on PS5. But the fact that these conversations are happening at all, under new leadership that has already signaled a more console-focused direction, tells you which way the wind is blowing. Corden noted that without a shift, Xbox's hardware operation risks shrinking to "basically what Surface is now," which he described as being "on its deathbed." Given that Microsoft recently acknowledged Game Pass pricing has become a problem, a return to exclusives paired with a more accessible subscription tier could be the play that actually gives Project Helix a fighting chance.