Microsoft is reportedly looking at making more of its first-party games exclusive to Xbox again. Bloomberg reports that while the company's big multiplayer titles will keep launching on all the major platforms, more of its best single-player games would stay on Xbox going forward, giving players a reason to buy the console. Microsoft hasn't confirmed a thing yet, so keep that REPORTEDLY front and center.
The claim comes from Bloomberg reporter Cecilia D'Anastasio's deep dive into last week's Xbox layoffs. Her report says Microsoft spent nearly $80 billion over the past decade on studios and content deals meant to turn Game Pass into the Netflix of gaming, and the service lost subscribers instead.
The exclusives detail was quickly picked up by Eurogamer and Windows Central, and for good reason. It runs against everything Xbox has done for the past two years.
The report doesn't name which games would stay put, and the multiplayer giants (think Call of Duty and Minecraft) aren't going anywhere. For now, Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution are already announced as Xbox console exclusives, and as Twisted Voxel notes, Microsoft hasn't publicly confirmed any shift beyond those.
Didn't Microsoft Just Send Halo To PS5?
Yes. Yes, it did. Halo: Campaign Evolved, the full remake of the original Halo: Combat Evolved campaign, hits PS5 on July 28th. That's roughly three weeks away, and it marks Master Chief's first ever appearance on a PlayStation console. Microsoft even confirmed the boxed version ships with a real, playable disc after weeks of fan worry, something we dug into last week when we asked whether that disc is a message for Sony.
So the company that's three weeks away from handing PlayStation players their very first Halo is reportedly debating whether games like it should ever make that trip again.
The report landed in the middle of a brutal week for Xbox. On July 6th, new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma published her "Resetting Xbox" memo, telling staff the business is "not healthy" as Microsoft moves to cut roughly 3,200 roles from its gaming division and part ways with four studios. Sharma also admitted the Game Pass bet "did not grow at the pace we expected," with the service reportedly losing millions of subscribers since 2024. And all of that followed a leak about studio closures and cancellations, which we sorted into confirmed and unconfirmed right here.
If the report is accurate, the ripple effects touch every corner of the ecosystem. Day-one first-party releases have been Game Pass' whole sales pitch, and pulling the best single-player games back onto Xbox hardware would make the console under your TV matter in a way it hasn't for years. It's the oldest play in the console business: buy the box, get the games.
PS5 players sit on the other side of that math. Two years of ports built a real expectation that Xbox games eventually come to everyone, and plenty of PlayStation owners are about to play their first Halo on July 28th. If re-exclusivity is real, that door could close almost as quickly as it opened, and future entries in these franchises could stay on the other side of it.
How We Got Here
The ports era started as a little experiment. Back in February 2024, Phil Spencer confirmed on the official Xbox podcast that four games were going multiplatform: Grounded, Sea of Thieves, Pentiment, and Hi-Fi Rush. The move was framed as a limited test, not a change to Xbox's larger exclusive strategy.
Within a year, Spencer was telling fans that "you are going to see more of our games on more platforms," and the floodgates opened wide: Forza Horizon 5, Gears of War: Reloaded, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and now Halo itself all made the jump to PS5.
The porting was like Microsoft admitting the console race was over, and now the same company reportedly wants back in it. I'm not sure you can un-ring that bell after two years of teaching everyone that your games come to them.
What are your thoughts? If Microsoft's best single-player games really do go Xbox-only again, does that actually put an Xbox back on your shopping list? Let us know in the comments below!
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