If you love your Xbox, Microsoft is surely counting on your business and for you to acquire Bethesda’s Starfield and Indiana Jones, and perhaps even an actual Xbox! Both games have a lot of anticipation from gamers and a bit of sourness from gamers that don’t play Xbox. If you have been following the ongoing resistance to Microsoft’s attempts to become rulers of the gaming world, you are likely familiar with the recent win for Microsoft as it was finally determined in court that Microsoft could proceed in its acquisition of Activision-Blizzard.
Microsoft fights to compete.
Another point of contention is Microsoft’s decision to keep Starfield and Indiana Jones exclusively on the Xbox. Back in 2020 Microsoft made a deal with Zenimax to have exclusive rights to all the games under their umbrella going forward. The deal only excluded two games that were already promised elsewhere. Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo were both in a timed exclusive deal with PlayStation.
It seems confusing for the company that recently conceded openly that they are clearly losing the console war, to then choose to diminish their sales of Starfield by only allowing Xbox users to play it, even with at least 1 circulating petition to make the game available on PlayStation. Starfield was announced to be exclusive pretty early on into teasers and info dumps, Indiana Jones however seemed more of a surprise to many gamers as nothing was said and many assumed it would be more available.
Starfield will sell less on one console.
Microsoft of course considered this as well. In fact Microsoft’s Gaming Chief Financial Officer, Tim Stuart, told the FTC that he estimated that they were opting out of approximately $10 million dollars in sales on PlayStation for Starfield and Indiana Jones combined. Despite this projected loss, he hoped that the deficit could be compensated by subscriptions to GamePass and increased sales of their console, Xbox x/s.
How exactly this will come to balance obviously remains to be seen, the unreleased games are not without some fan popularity, but as we have seen before it’s still in the air until it drops. The results could shape how Microsoft proceeds with game exclusivity in the future. For anyone worried about whether or not they will be able to play the next Call of Duty, breathe easy. Xbox has vowed to keep CoD available still on multiple platforms, and this is back by a million or so documents.
The FTC also is not done with their loss in the Activision-Blizzard acquisition court decision, and going forward they plan to appeal the case. This will likely mean more Xbox headlines moving forward, keep a look out, and keep on gaming no matter what console you have.
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