Many here will disagree, but I agree with you.

Xbox has to choose! Lower their head, become a publisher and let the money roll in, or...

Pay to see! Without guarantees and taking immense risk! A powerful move to pressure the competition, making everything exclusive to gain a leading position in the market. A half-hearted move with 2 little games won't move the needle, it will be money thrown away.

Xbox either lowers its head or goes all-in with the intention of winning!

Edit: I'm talking about "going Nintendo"! "All -in" means cutting Steam support! You want to play Xbox? Buy a Xbox console!! Xbox is to become a "must have product", just like 360 used to be in the golden age of Xbox!!

It'll be interesting what will happen in terms of regulatory bodies if they do this with COD & Activison titles, given iirc this was a point of contention with the acquisition.

CoD they signed 10 year contracts, they wouldn't be able to make them exclusive before they expire in another 6 years or so.

Nothing really stopping them from making other Activision titles exclusive. Don't think regulatory bodies would bat an eye if they made something like Spyro exclusive even if they could do something about it. They were really only ever interested in CoD.

Big multiplayer/live service games will continue to be multiplatform. Exclusivity for other games will be determined on case by case.

December 2024 - "Xbox president of game content and studios Matt Booty also discussed the exclusivity topic, suggesting that it will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis."

Back to case by case I see. With everything but two of the games having PS5 versions this really does ring hollow so far. Doing it as a test is fine though this half measure is not gonna do anything to save Xbox hardware sales. As mentioned they'd need to fully pull back from Playstation and PC as well to even have a shot at that and even then the damage to software sales would be so immense that I highly doubt it'd work out. To me this feels like Asha asked Nadella to go back to exclusivity and he let her do that with some upcoming games to throw the community a bone but with 0 intention of going all the way with it.

Also since there's no dedicated thread I'll say that the Xbox Games Showcase was overall nice with the Doom the Dark Ages DLC being surprisingly close and Vivarium looks beautiful but I'd say it was weaker than average compared to the past few. The one next year should be more interesting though.

It feels like they want to keep one console exclusive per year. Maybe. Possibly. With Gears this year and Clockwork next year.

Well, there it is.

Bold move to cut off so much of their potential audience, especially at the very last minute, but I respect the guts it took to take one last swing at an actual viable console business.

Maybe I'll end up grabbing an Xbox Series X someday after all.

Case by case? Lol ok

This is just to give them deniability against twitter fans because going full exclusive is a bad business decision for them now. That ship has already sailed.

If Gears fails on Xbox, it'll get a PS release no doubt, and they'll point to 'case by case' as their reason. No one should accept such flimsy decision making imho.