Jack of All Controllers

Game streaming has become more and more heated. With services snapping up exclusives left and right for streaming, Microsoft might be throwing their hat in the ring, although things aren’t concrete.

The Head of xCloud talked a little bit about the possibility of having exclusives on the service:

In terms of exclusives, we’re in early talks with first and third parties, but we don’t have any announcements to share. The first thing that we’re doing is… just lifting and shifting content that doesn’t require any development changes into the cloud. So right away we’ve got a platform that can run any of the 3000 games you can run on Xbox today

Kareem Choudhry, Head of Project xCloud

This could potentially mean in the future that Xbox Game Studios, as well as 3rd parties, might make exclusives for xCloud rather then Xbox and PC. This is similar to say Disney+ which has exclusives from Disney Channel Studios that won’t be on Disney Channel. It’s the same concept essentially, streaming gets a small exclusive boost to sell it.

While it isn’t 100%, it is an interesting thing to think about. PlayStation Now doesn’t have exclusives over PS4 or PS VR, but Google Stadia will have exclusives. So it’s just depends on who’s service it is.