Xbox confirms a third exclusive is coming but won't say what it is

Microsoft is walking back its multiplatform-everything strategy, and Xbox chief strategist Aaron Ball wants you to know Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution aren't the only games getting locked to Xbox. A third exclusive is coming — he just won't say what it is yet.

Ball told GamesRadar that both E-Day and Clockwork Revolution are permanent exclusives, not timed ones, and will never appear on PS5. Large live-service multiplayer games will still go multiplatform to reach the widest possible audience, but beyond that, the criteria are deliberately vague. "We have a framework for these selections, including how we evaluate them," Ball said, acknowledging the confusion: "I recognize that this approach is not obvious to all of our players, and we are committed to making this clearer." Chief content officer Matt Booty pushed back on the idea that single-player automatically means exclusive — "I think that's a good rule of thumb, but it certainly isn't something that's carved in stone" — and pointed to Xbox's portfolio of over 20 franchises that have each crossed a billion dollars in lifetime revenue, arguing different games serve different strategic purposes. Meanwhile, Halo: Campaign Evolved and Fable are still coming to PS5, with Fable not arriving until early 2027. Ball says those commitments to partners and players will be honored.

The reversal is striking because it comes roughly 24 months after Microsoft made the opposite call — putting first-party games on PlayStation to chase players wherever they were. Xbox has spent multiple console generations losing market share even while running a full slate of exclusives, so it's not obvious that a smaller, selective set of exclusives will reverse a trend that a larger one couldn't. The timing is also awkward: Xbox studios have been hit by significant layoffs tied to underperforming releases, and pulling games off PlayStation and Nintendo shrinks the addressable audience for those titles at exactly the moment the business needs them to perform.

New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's leadership is being cited internally as a catalyst for the strategy shift, but Booty is tempering expectations about how fast things can change given how long some projects have been in development. The community remains skeptical — the rapid policy reversals have made it hard to take any Xbox commitment at face value — and the lack of a clear, public framework for which games go exclusive and which don't isn't helping.