“Future 1P titles are developed for Xbox Series X first,” says Microsoft on cross-gen releases

Microsoft has made it a mission for the next generation of consoles: the company doesn’t want players to feel forced to buy an Xbox Series X this Holiday season. This has meant for quite a long time that Xbox Series X would not be coming with generational first-party exclusives for at least a couple years since its 2020 release, and a program like Smart Delivery was put into place for that purpose alone.

However, the latest Xbox Games Showcase featured multiple games whose trailers didn’t mention Xbox One. According to the details shared by Kotaku, titles like Obsidian Entertainment’s Avowed, Playground Games’ Fable, and Turn 10 Studios’ Forza Motorsport didn’t have the Xbox One logo at the end of their reveal trailers.

Also, games whose platforms hadn’t been disclosed at their original presentations, such as Rare’s Everwild and Senua’s Saga Hellblade II, have been confirmed to not be coming to Xbox One.

That would seemingly hint at Microsoft’s position on exclusives not being so different from Sony’s on PS5, after all.

Future 1P titles are developed for Xbox Series X first. Not saying those games won’t ship on Xbox One, only that we are leading with Series X & each studio will decide what's best for their game/community when they launch.

— Aaron Greenberg 🙅🏼‍♂️💚U (@aarongreenberg) July 23, 2020

At that end, Aaron Greenberg, general manager at Xbox games marketing, has shared a tweet in response to Kotaku‘s feature, where he made some clarity on the matter.

Greenberg mentioned that “future 1P titles are developed for Xbox Series X first,” which is why those trailers didn’t mention any other console.

“Not saying those games won’t ship on Xbox One, only that we are leading with Xbox Series X & each studio will decide what’s best for their game/community when they launch.”

This is slightly different from the original Microsoft statement about cross-gen and approaching next-gen.

However, we do see where this is coming from, and this is mostly assured to be happening because of the longer-term releases planned for these games.

The platform owner originally mentioned that titles coming in a couple of years would be cross-gen, which is hardly happening with the likes of Fable or Avowed.

It might be surprising for Hellblade II, which was the second first-party to be revealed for Xbox Series X and was already on Ninja Theory’s roadmap before the Xbox Game Studios acquisition, but we would take that as a clue about its release date as well.

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