While Bethesda announced multiple new projects on July 17, including several Fallout titles, it did not indicate whether they would be Xbox console exclusives. New statements about exclusivity published by GamesRadar make speculating about that even more confusing.
Bethesda teased Fallout 5, a co-developed title with Obsidian Entertainment, and remasters of Fallout 3 and New Vegas. It didn’t reveal much about any of those games, simply teasing a “special” 2027 Fallout Day celebration in Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, Todd Howard said in an interview with Windows Central that it was too early to comment on the exclusivity of the announced games.
These new Fallout games are all flagship-level titles that Xbox clearly wants players to care about in the coming years. That’s one of the reasons it’s so frustrating that Xbox and Bethesda are still being so coy about their exclusivity plans. This wasn’t helped by a new GamesRadar feature in which Xbox leadership made some confusing statements about the platform’s return to console exclusivity that was teased in June.
Chief Strategy Officer Matthew Ball told GamesRadar that “large live-service titles” will be multiplatform releases, although Gears of War: E-Day has an important multiplayer component and is console exclusive. That approach then seems to suggest that all single-player games, like those Fallout titles, will be console exclusives. But then Chief Content Officer Matt Booty told GamesRadar not to “overly fixate on single-player,” and that it’s “a good rule of thumb, but it certainly isn’t something that’s carved in stone.”
Right now, Xbox’s approach to console exclusivity appears contradictory. While Ball said Xbox is “committed to making this clearer” to players in the future, echoing similar comments to The Game Business, the lack of specificity in these Bethesda announcements shows that Xbox is already having trouble following through on that commitment.
In general, the Fallout announcements also felt like an effort to create excitement in the wake of Xbox leadership laying off several developers at Bethesda’s studios. The fact that we can’t get clear answers from Xbox on console exclusivity while it’s doing that exposes just how shallow all of Xbox’s recent announcements and promises to its players truly are.