The console wars are back on, baby: Xbox CEO says 'we have to be very thoughtful' about console exclusivity on future releases
Overview & Key Takeaways
PC gamers may escape the direct impact of renewed hostilities, but we'll feel it.
"Well, I guess we won the console war," PC Gamer's Evan Lahti declared back in 2020. It was a time of clear skies and hope: Microsoft had embraced Steam, Sony was bringing first-party games to PC, and we were all waving flags and pounding vodka shots atop silent tanks in Red Square. Metaphorically, anyway.
But now it looks like the fight is back on. Sony is backing away from its strategy of releasing PlayStation exclusives on PC, and now Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has hinted that Xbox is reconsidering its own approach to exclusives.
"We're the number two publisher in the world and in order to be a great publisher, you must have your games reach large audiences to play," Sharma said during a recent Bloomberg interview. "At the same time, we're increasingly becoming a platform. In order to be a platform, you must have exclusive content and services. And so, we're looking at that very closely. I think that we have to be very thoughtful about each title on how we want to think about it and learn from similar cases in the industry, and that's what we're doing."
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Like the unceremonious axing of the 'This is an Xbox' marketing campaign, Sharma's statement is a clear repudiation of former Xbox president Sarah Bond, who said flat-out in October 2025 that "the idea of locking [games] to one store or one device is antiquated for most people."
A potential refocus on exclusives is also obviously more about Xbox's dealings with PlayStation than PC. Shortly after Bond's comment, Microsoft announced its Halo remake for PlayStation, and man, it was over: As PC Gamer's Morgan Park put it at the time, "Though he shared joint custody with PC gaming in moments, Master Chief was Xbox ... His olive green armor practically was the console's logo in superhuman form. Now he's just the guy from Halo."
XBOX CEO Sharma Shares Vision for Reboot - YouTube
But now it sounds like maybe it's not as over as we thought. The direct impact on PC gamers may not be all that great, especially given Sharma's April acknowledgement that "our presence on PC isn't strong enough."
But we've all heard that one before—maybe more than twice, depending on how long you've been on this ride. If Microsoft really is "recommitting" to Xbox as a console, I don't think that, for instance, a future shift back toward more timed-exclusivity windows for big releases is beyond the question. Rockstar is holding back on a PC release of Grand Theft Auto 6 because PC players aren't GTA's "core" audience, which is baffling but also reflects the ongoing console-centric viewpoint of many game industry decision-makers.
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It sounds like the situation at Xbox is still very fluid, as they say in polite circles when nobody really knows what's going on, and what actually comes of it is anybody's guess. But those heady days of inter-platform peace and prosperity, with the PC as gaming's great unifier, sure do look to be over, and one way or another, some of that fallout is going to land on us.
