Phil Spencer Says There’s “No Fundamental Change” to How Xbox Thinks About Exclusivity

gamingbolt.com:

Microsoft has announced that it’s bringing four of its first-party Xbox titles to rival platforms, and though the company hasn’t named those four games yet, it’s said that two of them are smaller releases that are at least a year old, while the other two are live service games that will benefit from an expanded pool of players by going multiplatform. At the same time, it’s been confirmed that bigger, flagship first-party releases like Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will remain Xbox exclusives. So what exactly does this mean for Xbox’s first-party strategy as whole?

Well, according to Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, it’s mostly business as usual. Speaking about the company’s strategy on an official episode of the Official Xbox Podcast, Spencer said there’s “no fundamental change” to how Xbox is approaching exclusivity, and that releasing multiplatform titles from time to time is something the company has been doing for a while. According to Spencer, Microsoft’s focus continues to be growing the games industry by reaching more players, and through that, finding ways to grow Xbox.

“There’s really no fundamental change to how we think about exclusivity,” Spencer said. “We just came out of Developer Direct, which was an awesome show where we showed great games that are coming to Xbox, PC, and cloud, which makes them accessible to hundreds of millions of people. So we’re really focused on a couple platforms and what’s going to show up there.

“But our key of, ‘play the games you want, with the people you want, anywhere you want, when everybody plays, we all win’- these have been part of our strategy for years, and will continue to be. Our focus is on, how do we continue to grow the games industry by reaching more players in more places, and how do we grow Xbox as part of that- Xbox as a hardware platform, Xbox as a publisher of great games, and Xbox as a platform for the world’s best creators.”

Interestingly, Spencer also went on to talk about the