It's all on a case by case basis. Some second-party games are Microsoft-funded, or Microsoft secures exclusive publishing rights, or owns the IP even without intention of owning the studio (The Mistwalker games come to mind, here). Some games are *merely* Microsoft published, like Mass Effect 1.

Can't know unless we talk to each developer separately.

@Chris Hu

I don't know exactly how published type contract games work, but when mass effect 2 was announced for ps3, Microsoft was bragging about the whole experience still better on xbox 360, implying that the first game was exclusive and at that moment bioware was already acquired by EA, then mass effect 3 was announced. So in my opinion, the acquisition has nothing to do with the lost of exclusivity of the first game. If anything, the effect were on the second and the third games.

If MS owns the IP then it will be exclusive.

A good example is Demon's Souls... Sony owned the IP so no other console can have this game with that name but the third-party developer can create a new IP like Dark Souls.

Titanfall and MineCraft are timed exclusives and MS did't have the IP... if they will be release in others concoles just the dev can know but they can do anything they want.

Dead Rising 3 is Capcom's IP... even ir MS publish it... Capcom can relese it in another plataform with another Publisher.

Ryse: Son of Rome, Sunset Overdrive and D4... I don't know if the IP is owned by MS.

Sunset Overdrive is Insomniac's ip

That's the point... what I'm spreading is not FUD... the Cloud is not different from clusters of dedicated servers.

There are nothing new... the Gmail, Hotmail, etc... all mains runs over clusters of dedicated servers.

The differece in Azure is that these servers can be used for other things... that's reduce costs but increse complexibility and decrease performance to handle these "shared" servers... it is like I runing all games in a big dedicated server instead a server per game.

Cloud is nothing new, nothing revolutionary, nothing that will change how the games works.

The games will run equal using Cloud or dedicated servers... there are no differece to the end user... to the gamers.

Very little to believe with any developer.  They can only guess as to what anyone else is doing just like us. 

FUD it is then.

I already detailed 3 differences from typical dedicated servers for you. And these aren't mine, they are straight from the people making the game themselves. Maybe you should send them a resume? You apparently know more about this stuff than even they do. DICE sure could use your help with their shitty servers.

@ STAGE - Quantum Break  is owned by Microsoft.  Microsoft L.A. Studios.  2nd Party just means they have a 2nd party working on it as well.  Two developers.  One is a First party developer and the other is a 2nd party developer.  

Even without IP ownership, exclusivity can be established by the publisher. GoldenEye is the most famous example, where Rare was a ways along in porting it to Xbox Live before they found out that Nintendo retains exclusive rights to the title, while having nothing resembling ownership of Rare or James Bond.

It all depends.