Despite breaking exclusivity with multiple first-party games, Microsoft's latest annual report says that "exclusive games content" is a measure of growth of its interactive entertainment business.
Microsoft has lofty goals for Xbox. The company wants to bring its gaming business everywhere that people currently are, including mobile phones, the living room, PCs, even directly to TVs via cloud streaming. Microsoft has the service infrastructure and technology, and now that it's armed with 20x game franchises that have made over $1 billion each, it also has the content.
But there's just one issue: delivery. Xbox consoles have been flagging for years, leading Microsoft to not only purchase some of the biggest third-party publishers on the planet with Activision-Blizzard and ZeniMax, but also start releasing its games in competing platforms. Earlier this year, Microsoft brought four more first-party games to PlayStation and Nintendo Switch, a trend that will continue with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. At one point, Microsoft even had more first-party games on the PS Store's top 10 best-sellers than Sony did. The age of exclusivity seems to be behind us, or at the very least, behind the overarching goal of higher numbers and better margins.
Interestingly enough, exclusivity is still a metric that Microsoft uses to weigh the growth of Xbox, despite current CEO Satya Nadella having "no love for that world."
In a recent annual report--the same report that reiterated how Microsoft would expand its games to more platforms--the company outlined how it specifically measures success in gaming:
"Xbox enables people to connect and share online gaming experiences that are accessible on Xbox consoles, Windows-enabled devices, and other devices. Xbox is designed to benefit users by providing access to a network of certified applications and services and to benefit our developer and partner ecosystems by providing access to a large customer base.
"Xbox revenue is mainly affected by subscriptions and sales of first- and third-party content, as well as advertising.
"Growth of our Gaming business is determined by the overall active user base through Xbox enabled content, availability of games, providing exclusive game content that gamers seek, the computational power and reliability of the devices used to access our content and services, and the ability to create new experiences."
It's worth remembering that this could be a generalized section that hearkens back to the Gen 8 days of earnest Xbox exclusivity.
2023's FTC v Microsoft trial heavily pressured the idea of any kind of exclusive games content, whether it be full games or add-ons, especially in the realm of Activision Blizzard King games. Microsoft ultimately has to be careful in which games it does make exclusive because worldwide regulators are watching closely.