Exclusivity and XBOX – these two terms are stuck together like peanut butter and jelly. Since Asha Sharma took over as CEO now rebranded XBOXbecame exclusives topic number one for the brand. In turn, gaming social networks light up like a Christmas tree when something like this is voiced by him or anyone on the XBOX team.
Recently Bloomberg Tech streamAsha was hit with a big question about XBOX exclusives and answered in kind:
“It’s a tough topic. Look, we’re the number two publisher in the world, and to be a big publisher, your games need to reach a big audience to play. At the same time, we’re increasingly becoming a platform, and to be a platform, you have to have exclusive content and services,” he said.
ongoing, “And so we’re looking at it very carefully. I think that every title, we have to think a lot about how we want to think about it and learn from some similar situations in the industry, and that’s what we’re doing.”
I’ve seen people online refer to it as the nothing burger, while others rush to the frontlines as the second coming of the exclusives. The truth, like everything else, is wrapped in corporate lingo; the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle.
Digging into his quote, you can see that Asha is waging a war on two fronts. On the one hand, it has to feed the insatiable money-making machine on XBOX, the machine Amy Hood built to chase that elusive 30% margin. Asham specifically mentions that you don’t need to deal with it.
“So my mandate is not a 30% accountability margin. It’s to be the number one gaming and entertainment company, and we’re going to do that.” Hallelujah!
Still, when you’re the second largest publisher on the planet, you can’t just make games; you have to sell them too. To prepare a similar juggernaut Call of Duty it would be like burning a pile of exclusive money in a fire. We are talking about a franchise that sells 15-30 million copies a year. Cut that in half and you’re suddenly looking at more than one studio closing.
When you spend that kind of money on development or acquiring IPs and studios, you need to see a return on that investment, and games the size of Call of Duty will be a death blow to the brand. If XBOX wasn’t willing to pay more than $2 billion a year in losses.
Why exclusives still make sense
But let’s not bury the exclusives just yet. Last year I called XBOX consoles anything but glorified Game Pass machines. Then the Game Pass prices went up to the Halo rings and honestly the XBOX was lost for me. Thank you pricing decisions is reversed.
However, in Asha’s own words, “We are becoming more and more a platform, and to be a platform, you have to have exclusive content and services.”
It focuses on content and services, not just services. This means that Game Pass and other services aren’t the only things that need to be exclusive to the platform; there should be games too.
Imagine this: Fairy taleactually exclusive to XBOX. Suddenly people have a real reason to pick up the green box, “pro-consumer” or not. Nintendo and for a reason Sony has an army of loyal fans; they have games they can’t play anywhere else.
Now, I don’t think Fable will be exclusive since it’s already released as a PlayStation game, but that doesn’t mean future titles can’t return to some sort of exclusivity.
To sell hardware, which XBOX has been struggling latelyyou need content as a reason to own said hardware. Do you think it would be cool if Apple TV, Paramount or Netflix shared their shows with each other? Subscribe to multiple services to get access to more content? Maybe you only subscribe to one because you prefer the exclusive content on that platform over the other.
Heck, there’s a reason Sales of XBOX consoles increased by 15% In the UK, PlayStation is down 50%. Spoiler: it happened Forza Horizon 6.
All this while Forza Horizon 6 is scheduled to arrive on PlayStation 6. Even GaaS titles can drive sales even if they’re only timed exclusives.
Imagine if Netflix had everything, Disney Plus and Amazon Prime launched their content on Netflix as well as their own service. Would you subscribe to Netflix or something else?
Building a platform means offering something that other platforms don’t. Sure, it could be in the form of instant resume, XBOX Live, or something, but if you want a console that can play God of War, Wolverine, Death Stranding 2 (at launch), Fable, and Forza Horizon 6, there’s only one console that can do it.
The problem for XBOX, at least for me, is that we spent years waiting for their exclusive games to pay off. Every year it was “This is Xbox’s chance” and when they finally got enough content in the works, they stomped on it and started running it somewhere else.
As a result, we’ve seen the results of year-over-year declines in XBOX hardware and an XBOX with no real gaming personality. When you think of a Sony or Nintendo game, you imagine what that means.
What comes to mind when you think of XBOX? Now ask yourself: is this game still an XBOX exclusive, or can I play it on PlayStation now or in the future?
I stop my work.
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