Phil Spencer, the Xbox chief says that there’ll be fewer exclusives one day in the future between console brands.
Phil Spencer was talking to Bloomberg during an interview. The Xbox chief said that he believes there will be “less and less” platform-exclusive games.
Call of Duty won’t be exclusive to Xbox
The Xbox chief was responding to a question in relation to Microsoft’s pending acquisition of Activision Blizzard and the topic of keeping Call of Duty as a cross-platform title.
Despite Microsoft soon owning the licence to Call of Duty, Spencer said that fewer platform exclusives would be “good for the industry”.
“Maybe in the short run, there are some people in some companies that don’t love it,” said Spencer. “But I think as we get over the hump and see where this industry can continue to grow, it proves out to be true.”
Call of Duty is a successful cross-platform brand
For most of its existence, the Call of Duty franchise has been cross-platform, other than its early PC days. In recent years, Call of Duty has not only been cross-platform but it’s also become cross-progression enabled. Meaning that it doesn’t matter which platform you play on, your online progress will maintain across all platforms.
So, if Microsoft decided to one day cut out PlayStation gamers, it wouldn’t go down well. Sure, Microsoft could claim console (and PC) exclusivity, but it would end lots of investment from players across the board.
Furthermore, as Microsoft recently stated, it simply wouldn’t be profitable to make Call of Duty exclusive to a single console platform.
Do you agree with Xbox chief Phil Spencer?
However, in my opinion, Call of Duty being cross-platform is a very different prospect to the likes of, let’s say God of War. Can we see a world in which Halo is on PlayStation, God of War on Nintendo Switch or Super Mario on Xbox? Granted that world would awesome,
However, many first-party titles are available on a particular console as well as on PC. For example, the likes of Halo, Gears of War and Forza are available on Xbox and PC. More recently, Sony has ported God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn and Marvel’s Spider-Man to PC, with the promise of more to come.
That being said, it may be a little old-school thinking, but I like certain brands being exclusive to certain consoles. After all, some exclusives such as Super Mario are part of Nintendo’s identity, as is Halo to Xbox and Uncharted to PlayStation.
Do you agree with Phil Spencer of Xbox and would you like to see more console exclusives make the jump to other brands? Let us know across our social media channels.
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Featured Image Credit: E3/Microsoft/Source: Bloomberg