Microsoft clearly still cares about Game Pass. Exclusives? Not so much
Last week, I posited that the Xbox showcase on June 9 would be the most important in the history of Microsoft’s gaming division. If it wasn’t, that could be because this slick prerecorded show couldn’t possibly compete for historical impact with, for example, the garbage fire that was the 2013 Xbox One reveal event, or the bungled E3 show that followed it. It was confident and smooth in its orchestration, impressive in a way that was almost calming after the awkward anticlimax of Summer Game Fest two days earlier. But it was still immensely significant: for its indication of the seismic publishing power Microsoft now holds, for the questions it answered about Xbox’s future, and for the questions it didn’t.
In fact, the two most telling bits of news emerged outside the boundaries of the show itself. The first was the confirmation, more than a week before the show, that Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will be released on Game Pass on day one. The second, which was not mentioned by Microsoft during its showcase but slipped out in a press release alongside it, is that Doom: The Dark Ages (one of the biggest first-party reveals of the event) is also coming to PlayStation 5.
Between them, these two facts spell out Microsoft’s strategy quite clearly: Game Pass is everything, and Xbox consoles aren’t. Microsoft is doubling down hard on its subscription service, and bringing its new, almost terrifying might as a game publisher to bear on the Game Pass catalog. But the company had little to say about Xbox hardware, and its attitude to console exclusivity for Microsoft-owned games remains ambivalent at best.
After the shock release of four former Xbox exclusives on PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch earlier this year, many Xbox fans were looking to Sunday’s showcase for explicit reassurance that Microsoft was still investing in Xbox consoles by getting its vast army of first-party studios to make exclusive games for them. That reassurance did not come. In fact, Xbox console
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