PlayStation and Xbox have learned painful lessons about exclusives

But now Sony has begun its retreat, and Xbox is also signalling a change of heart. New CEO Asha Sharma has promised to “reevaluate our approach to exclusivity.” Forza Horizon 6 just launched as a timed console exclusive on Xbox and PC (a PlayStation 5 version is due later) and it’s doing very well indeed. Are we headed back to the good/bad (delete according to preference) days?

Well… somewhat. It certainly seems to be true that Sony and Microsoft are discovering that multi-platform release strategies have their drawbacks. But the reality that governed both companies’ experimentation over the last few years hasn’t changed, and it’s this: There is no one-size-fits-all solution anymore. Exclusivity is conditional. Sometimes it makes sense, and sometimes it doesn’t.

To start with, consider that Sony is only making its “narrative single-player games” exclusive to PlayStation consoles. Its multiplayer games, like Marathon and Helldivers 2, will continue to be multi-platform. This makes sense when you consider how big a hit Helldivers 2 was on PC, or how the long-standing Destiny community on Xbox would feel if Bungie left them behind. It also makes sense when you consider the games themselves, which are arguably only improved by being shared with as wide a pool of players as possible.

Meanwhile, the “narrative single-player games” — a reference to Sony’s trademark cinematic action-adventures like The Last of Us and God of War — bring a level of prestige and marketing value to the PlayStation brand that Sony was never fully willing to relinquish. These games didn’t arrive on PC until a year or even more after their PlayStation versions, and after a strong start, their sales were pretty mediocre. Fans were clearly finding them first on PlayStation, something Sony will have been quite happy with. This is the most important takeaway from Sony’s U-turn — not that multi-platform publishing doesn’t work, but that Sony’s half-hearted approach to it didn’t.

Even this conclusion comes with a caveat, though. Consider the case of Forza Horizon 5, which arrived on PlayStation 5 three-and-a-half years after its Xbox and PC release and sold like gangbusters. That port was clearly worth Microsoft’s while. Why? Because there was a big, underserved racing game audience on PS5, perhaps, or because Forza Horizon is closer to being a multiplayer live-service game than a single-player adventure (though it’s a bit of both), or because racing games don’t suffer from FOMO degradation over time in the same way narrative games do, or because the PS5 and Steam audiences are very different.

Asha Sharma will certainly want to think very carefully before following Sony’s lead. Abandoning PC is almost certainly off the table for Xbox, considering Microsoft’s own investment in gaming on Windows (and considering the steadily climbing graph of Forza players on Steam that I’m watching as I type this). Xbox is also not in the position of strength in the market that PlayStation is, and arguably needs PS5 sales to recoup its investment on games like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle or this year’s Fable. It also now owns titles like Call of Duty and The Elder Scrolls, which are genuinely too big to consider exclusivity for. But then again, how can Xbox regain any strength in the market without some exclusivity?

Image: Playground Games/Xbox Game Studios

It’s all very well to point to Nintendo — which, in the last year, has sold 19.86 million Switch 2 consoles and 14.7 million copies of the Switch 2-exclusive Mario Kart World — as an example of the power of the exclusive. But Nintendo owns the most valuable intellectual property in gaming while also having considerably lower development costs than its rivals, thanks to its unique approach to game hardware. What works for Nintendo works for Nintendo. It wouldn’t necessarily work as well for anyone else.

The biggest challenge to platform exclusivity remains the sheer cost of developing AAA games in the face of a market that isn’t growing. For third-party publishers, that makes multiplatform publishing a no-brainer; I don’t think Final Fantasy is going back to PlayStation exclusivity. For Sony and Microsoft, it’s complicated. Sony can probably bear the cost as an investment in the success of its platform; even if Marvel’s Wolverine doesn’t make the company a ton of money, Fortnite and Grant Theft Auto 6 certainly will. Microsoft could afford to do the same if it wanted to, but the numbers might make its accountants’ eyes water, so it would have to really want to.

Sony and Microsoft seem to have realized — or rather, remembered — that exclusive games give a platform meaning, identity, and a reason to buy. They, and the industry as a whole, should not be in a hurry to erase that, so it’s good that they’re turning back from the brink. But the return of exclusives will only be partial, conditional, and on a case-by-case basis — when, and only when, the numbers add up.