Phil Spencer says he's open to bringing stores like Epic and Steam to Xbox consoles

Historically, exclusive game releases have been a powerful weapon in the console war: Customers are more apt to buy a certain piece of hardware if that's the only way they can get the particular games they want to play. In an interview with Polygon, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said Microsoft is now leaning away from that strategy, to the point that he's even open to the idea of having digital storefronts like the Epic Games Store and Itch.io on Xbox consoles.

It was a big deal earlier this year when rumors that Microsoft was planning to bring Xbox-exclusive games to PlayStation first began to surface. It ultimately proved to be true, although only a small number of games—and none of the big ones—are currently set to make the move. But it really seemed to set the tone for the future: In a podcast confirming the Xbox-to-PlayStation pipeline, Spencer said that over the next five to 10 years, console-exclusive games «are going to be a smaller and smaller part of the games industry.»

Speaking to Polygon at GDC, Spencer said the shift is aimed at helping to restore growth to the industry by making more games available to more people on more platforms—something younger gamers tend to take for granted.

«This notion that Xbox can only be this one device that plugs into a television isn’t something we see in the Gen Z research,» Spencer said. «Because nothing else is like that for them. Some of them will have an iPhone, some will have an Android, but all the games and everything is the same. I can still get to TikTok on both of them, at least for now.

»All of their stuff is available wherever they want. So for Xbox, our brand pivot—as we attract and maintain relevance with a younger audience—is ‘Xbox is a place where I can find the great games I want to?'"

I'm not so sure that «everything is the same,» as Spencer put it. Crossplay is a fairly common feature these days but I have an Android and my partner has an iPhone, and interoperability is not high on the list of things they do