Here’s how things stand re Xbox: strictly speaking, there’s no longer any such thing as an Xbox exclusive, and that’s been the case for a while now. Its console exclusives are all proudly coming to PC. Xbox is a brand of consumer gaming hardware, yes, the box that sits under your TV, but it’s also a Windows app, an Android app, and it’s part of a much larger game publishing portfolio that Microsoft runs, as much as it makes sense to, as a platform agnostic enterprise. It puts games on Switch and PlayStation. It even funnels games directly to your TV, bypassing the need for a console entirely. Does that mean there’s no longer any reason to own an Xbox? Well, that depends entirely on you. Xbox is the American games platform and the American USP, for better or worse, is choice.
This is to say that we’ve pretty much transcended the old paradigms of which box is best. Every major platform holder has its own proposition, its own image, its own price barrier for entry. And so, it really doesn’t matter if the games showcased on Sunday night are exclusives, console exclusives, or timed exclusives: the point is that they’re Xbox games, wherever they happen to get played. And Xbox games are looking great.
We had major updates on legacy IPs that have until now felt chronically under-leveraged while Spencer & Co were bogged down with lengthy acquisitions, fighting PR fires about whether or not game X would be on competitor Y’s box, or solemnly putting hundreds of people out of work while gleefully spending literal tens of billions on the aforementioned. Fable and Perfect Dark look superb, both sporting new gameplay trailers that suggest a carefully applied sense of what these properties are supposed to look and feel like, while showing no hesitation in updating them for modern tastes.
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