Microsoft has been lacking in exclusives while Sony is dominating the industry from all directions that everyone could have imagined. The lack of Xbox exclusives will not change soon according to an industry insider under the NeoGAF username “Matt”.
Matt’s statement follows:
“MS is not meaningfully increasing their investments in or focus on first party. That could change, I would love for that to change, but it hasn’t.” – posted over NeoGAF.
It seems that Microsoft is not in any way focusing on new IPs relatively soon aside from Sea of Thieves if this is truly accurate — well, you know how the internet can spur out a lot of misleading details. But it does actually show that Microsoft is not investing on their first-party studios. We don’t get to see any new first-party IPs from their first-party studios, and all we get are simply sequels of Gears, Forza, and Halo.
If you take the likes of Cuphead, ReCore, Crackdown 3, Ori, State of Decay 2 as first-party exclusives, they’re not literally “first-party exclusives” as Microsoft made deals with these studios to make their games solely exclusive to Microsoft and publish them. Let’s use the proper term “third-party Microsoft exclusives”.
This is an awfully terrible strategy that Microsoft is taking. With the launch of their mid-generation Xbox One X is relatively closing in, what can this mid-gen upgrade offer aside from first-party sequels, 4K, horsepower, UHD blu-ray playback, and third-party titles? Nothing.
Microsoft is too reliant on third-party developers to make the games for them. Instead of molding their first-party teams, acquiring other studios to have that diversity Sony has, they would rather focus more on third-party content. It’s not a bad thing to do, but it didn’t do well for them if we look into the statistics and the game’s quality. Even if the original Xbox One is inferior to the PS4, if it only offered what the PS4 did in terms of exclusives then it would have also sold well.
I love the existing library that Microsoft has, but it gets too old fairly quickly. The spark isn’t there anymore if a sequel of Halo and Gears will be announced. The level of excitement has been drained, and this is something that Microsoft should remedy. That cancellation of Scalebound still scarred me the most as I’ve been waiting for that Xbox third-party exclusive. But it seems that we get more cancellations than delays, which the latter is actually the lesser evil. Project Spark? Axed. Fable Legends? Axed. Scalebound? AXED.
I hope this is just a hearsay, and if it’s not then I hope Microsoft will rectify this soon than never.