As the next part of its major rebrand towards being driven by their players, XBOX (now officially all capital letters) just launched the Player Voice feedback portal. The new site aims to collect the opinions and ideas of Xbox gamers, allowing them to submit their thoughts, vote on topics and write responses, along with being able to track Microsoft’s own response to the issues. Within just an hour, one topic has overwhelmingly become the leading issue: exclusivity.
Being the #1 topic on the site, the ‘EXCLUSIVES’ post has over 2,600 votes and 350 comments at time of writing. The description simply reads “XBOX was built off of great game exclusives, you cannot sell any consoles without a reason to buy the console…”, before ending with a definitive “BRING THEM BACK PLEASE!!!”
The post has hundreds of players agreeing with the sentiment, and is even making the rounds on social media. Coincidentally, it comes just as Sony confirms they’ll be refocusing on console exclusivity for their single-player games, abandoning the PC outside of their multiplayer live-service releases.
The new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is under huge pressure from the platform’s audience to reintroduce exclusivity of their first-party titles, seen by fans as a way to guarantee the long-term success of the Xbox brand. Sharma recently said decisions on the topic have “decade-long” impacts, so it is being considered internally but will require time for decisions to be made.
Xbox’s spree of acquisitions gave it an arsenal of first-party titles, but they’ve remained committed to multi-platform launches. From Starfield to Diablo and Forza to even Halo, the big Xbox-owned series have so far been shared.
We’ll be sure to report on whatever comes next as part of Xbox’s focused reinvention of the brand. With a new console on the way and now heaps of player feedback to respond to, it’s sure to be an eventful year for Xbox.
