Head of the Xbox division: Exclusives will have no future in gaming

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Phil Spencer, the head of Microsoft’s Xbox division, said recently that he believes “exclusive” games will play a smaller and smaller role in future console development.
Bloomberg recently interviewed Phil Spencer. In this interview, he talked about a number of different topics, including the acquisition of Activision Blizzard at the beginning of the year, the formation of unions, and his views on exclusive games.

The Xbox chief said that while Activision Blizzard’s acquisition was huge, he was confident it could eventually go as planned.

Game Pass plan

“I feel good about the progress that we’ve been making, but I go into the process supportive of people who maybe aren’t as close to the gaming industry asking good, hard questions about ‘what is our intent? What does this mean? If you play it out over five years, is this constricting a market? Is it growing a market?”

“I’ve never done a 70 billion-dollar deal, so I don’t know what my confidence means,” Spencer said. “I will say the discussions we’ve been having seem positive.”

At the same time, Phil Spencer believes that players can’t play together “because we bought the wrong piece of plastic to plug into our television. We really love to be able to bring more players in reducing friction, making people feel safe, secure when they’re playing, allowing them to find their friends, play with their friends, regardless of what device  — I think in the long run that is good for this industry. And maybe in the short run, there’s some people in some companies that don’t love it. But I think as we get over the hump and see where this industry can continue to grow, it proves out to be true.”

In other words, neither exclusivity nor cross-playability is Phil Spencer’s vision for console games. However, for the next masterpiece of “Starry Sky” in 2023, Microsoft has publicly stated that it will be released on the Xbox and PC and has no intention of being released on the PlayStation platform, which is a bit contrary to Phil Spencer’s comment.

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