Xbox’s Matt Booty Says Its Exclusivity Bet Is Just Two Games

Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty says the platform’s celebrated return to console exclusivity covers exactly two games, Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution, with nothing else locked in. Everything beyond those two gets decided case by case, he told Variety after last month’s Xbox Games Showcase.

That is a narrower promise than the celebratory headlines suggested. A fresh report making the rounds this week says Microsoft may already be looking to add more exclusives to the lineup, even as independent analysts argue the two games already announced will not move meaningful hardware sales either way.

Two Games, Several Exceptions

Booty framed the shift as a reward for fans who stuck around through years of Xbox games landing on PlayStation and Nintendo hardware under former chief Phil Spencer, before Asha Sharma took over as Xbox CEO.

“We want to give Xbox players a reason to believe in Xbox, a reason to buy an Xbox, be an Xbox fan. We also want to reward the people who’ve been with us and have been loyal,” Booty told Variety following the show.

“So we’re doing one this year in 2026, going to do one next year in 2027, and then we’re going to continue to think about it going forward,” he said, adding that Sharma wants Xbox to “make the right decision, not a fast decision.”

Booty laid out three buckets in the same conversation:

• Big multiplayer and live service games stay multiplatform, with no change planned.
• Already announced multiplatform titles keep their existing plans, since Xbox says it will not take something away from players who were promised it.
• Everything else gets weighed case by case, with platform decisions withheld until a release date is set.

Fans had also pushed back before the show over Xbox displaying rival PlayStation and Nintendo logos during its presentations. Booty said the goal going forward is clarity on where a game will run, balanced against making sure “Xbox fans want to feel like it’s their show,” a tension he said the team will keep working to balance.

Why Gears of War Skipped Its PlayStation Debut

Officially, Gears of War: E-Day is not coming to PS5, not now and not later. Xbox says both new exclusives are permanent, not timed.

“As part of our focus on the return of Xbox, we also announced that Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution will be Xbox console exclusives,” Xbox’s own showcase recap states. “These are not timed exclusives.”

The company has said this before and reversed itself. Video Games Chronicle noted that recent Xbox console exclusives including Indiana Jones and Starfield eventually turned up on PS5 anyway, and that a PS5 build of E-Day had reportedly already surfaced on ratings boards before Microsoft pulled the plug. WinAddons previously reported on the scrapped PlayStation version of E-Day as Sharma’s first major exclusivity call.

Booty was asked directly whether pulling Gears back from PS5 risked alienating players who had just discovered the franchise through its remaster. He said Sharma’s arrival gave the team a chance to “put the focus on the future,” and that the decision followed from that focus.

What’s Exclusive and What Isn’t Anymore

The showcase ran 75 minutes and covered 28 titles, but the split between locked and open platforms was the real news of the night. Here is how the lineup breaks down.

Booty pointed to the fall calendar as part of the logic. Grand Theft Auto 6 lands in November, making September and October unusually crowded, and he said Xbox has “a lot of confidence” in Gears going up against that traffic while giving Fable, whose own gameplay walkthrough already drew fan reaction over its facial animation work, room to land on its own in early 2027.

Will the Exclusives Actually Sell More Xboxes?

Probably not, according to the analyst who covered the announcement most closely. Rhys Elliott of Anlinea Analytics told GameSpot the two games are being positioned to win back goodwill, not to shift console sales, because Xbox’s install base is too small for one exclusive title to matter financially.

Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution are sacrificial lambs for hearts and minds, not economics.

Elliott, whose comments were reported by GameSpot, also argued that releasing both games on Steam alongside Xbox hardware undercuts the entire premise of console exclusivity, since PC players never needed a console in the first place. “A Gears console exclusive does not shift meaningful numbers of Series X units,” he said.

Not everyone inside Xbox sees it as a loyalty gesture divorced from strategy. Sharma has separately argued that console players in the Xbox ecosystem spend roughly four times more over their lifetime than other user types, a figure Windows Central’s Jez Corden reported is shaping her approach to which titles are worth holding back.

Xbox’s Own Strategist Denies a Reversal

Rumors that Microsoft would quietly abandon the exclusivity push once the numbers came in started almost immediately. Xbox’s chief strategist moved to shut them down in public.

“These rumors are false,” Matthew Ball wrote on X on June 16, according to Kotaku. “Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution will stay exclusive. There are no conversations and have been no conversations to reverse course.”

The disagreement over what happens next is genuine, and it runs through the industry’s own analysts as much as through fans.

• Matthew Ball, Xbox’s chief strategist, says the exclusivity commitment is permanent and that similar signature exclusives should be expected every year going forward.
• Rhys Elliott, the Anlinea Analytics analyst who first raised the reversal theory, expects at least some backtracking once quarterly revenue shows the cost of skipping PS5 sales.
• Asha Sharma herself has split the difference, telling Fortune Conversations that being multiplatform makes Xbox “stronger” while insisting a platform still needs exclusive content to mean anything.

A Rough Week for the Return of Xbox

The loyalty pitch is arriving alongside some of the roughest financial news Xbox has delivered in years. Windows Central reported that Microsoft began eliminating 3,200 roles from its gaming division the same week, with hundreds already gone from divested studios.

That reporting also describes the winding down of what Windows Central called Xbox’s “loathed” Project Latitude strategy, the multiyear push to publish Xbox games on PlayStation that Sharma is now pulling back from in favor of exclusivity.

The Verge reported in April that Sharma told an all hands meeting the company would fully re-evaluate exclusivity, release timing and artificial intelligence integration, and that Microsoft has shifted its primary internal metric from console sales to daily active users, or DAU. The change signals Xbox increasingly measuring itself as a service business rather than a hardware seller, even while leaning on hardware-exclusive games to drive loyalty.

The wider release calendar isn’t making the timing any easier. Market researcher Newzoo estimates the global games industry generates more than $190 billion a year across 3.6 billion players, a pool every publisher is fighting over during the same crowded September and October window Booty flagged.

Sharma and Booty’s First Four Months

Work on this year’s showcase began in December, months before Sharma joined in February. By the time she arrived, the pool of candidate games was already locked. What changed under her, Booty said, was everything downstream: ordering, trailers, scripts and, ultimately, the exclusivity call itself.

“She’s great to work with, brings a lot of energy, a lot of excitement, a lot of curiosity, a lot of willingness to revisit things that maybe we might not have looked at before,” Booty said of the four months since she joined the process in early March.

He described his own role as making sure long-tenured staff bring Sharma up to speed on industry nuance without burying her in history lessons, since she remains “very squarely focused on moving forward.” One small, symbolic example of that forward focus: Xbox let fans vote earlier this year on restyling the brand in all capital letters, a fan-driven tweak Game Informer noted alongside the exclusivity reversal as evidence of a leadership team now listening more closely to its base.

Blade and Elder Scrolls 6 Wait Their Turn

Two of the showcase’s most requested no-shows were Marvel’s Blade and The Elder Scrolls 6. Booty’s answer for both was the same: the show could not fit everything, and there are “other beats coming up in the year.”

On Elder Scrolls specifically, he offered more than a deflection. “I can tell you, having visited Bethesda and sat with Todd and seen Elder Scrolls playing, it looks amazing, and it’s coming along well,” Booty said, referring to Bethesda Game Studios director Todd Howard. He called revealing a game too early “one of the more challenging balancing acts” of his job, since a reveal doubles as a promise the game is coming soon.

Howard offered his own update separately to Entertainment Weekly, saying Elder Scrolls 6 is Bethesda’s “biggest project right now,” with the majority of the studio working on it, and adding, “we know we need to get it right, and it’s been a long time.” The game was first announced at E3 2018, meaning it has now gone unshown at Xbox’s marquee event for roughly eight years running. Howard also told the outlet that Arkane Studios is “doing a really, really great job” on Blade.

Fall 2026 doubles as Xbox’s 25th anniversary, alongside Blizzard’s 35th and Bethesda’s 40th, and Booty called the overlap “a great reflection of the brand” rather than a coincidence to explain away. Whatever Microsoft has saved for that milestone, Booty was clear on one point: neither Blade nor Elder Scrolls 6 is it, at least not yet.