Elder Scrolls VIBethesdaIn a new interview with new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, she was pressed on what the plan was for one of the hardest challenges facing Xbox, and what has upset its fans the most: the concept of exclusivity of Xbox games.What’s happened in recent years is that Xbox has brought loads of its big games directly to its competitor, PlayStation, whether that’s years or months later, or, increasingly, launching them day one beside the Xbox release. That has cratered the “identity” of Xbox among fans, as the question becomes, “How is Microsoft not just a third-party developer that makes hardware?”Sharma told Bloomberg the current line of thinking:“We're increasingly becoming a platform. In order to be a platform, you must have exclusive content and services. 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.”The problem here is that this is pretty much where Microsoft is now. Sony, for its other issues, has a pretty clear release strategy in place. PS5 gets all its big, first-party single-player games (it seems they’re about to pull them of PC, as well). Sony will release its multiplayer games on PC as well as PS5. With rare exceptions (Bungie’s Marathon, for one), nothing goes to Xbox.Play Puzzles & Games on ForbesFableMicrosoftIf Microsoft is just doing games on a case-by-case basis rather than putting in place firm guidelines, that’s not addressing the issue. And it’s so late in the game, you have to wonder when things are actually meant to change. Microsoft has already handed PlayStation Forza Horizon 6, its stellar racing game and one of its core franchises. PlayStation will get Fable, one of Xbox’s biggest games of the generation, on day one. There are a few open questions, mainly what might happen with Gears of War E-Day, but past that? What are we talking about here?My guess is that they’d pick out a few “core” franchises eventually, and go “See? Xbox only.” The big, obvious one is the next Halo game, which has not been announced and is likely not coming for a few more years. Then there’s the eternal question of Elder Scrolls VI, and given that Microsoft owns Bethesda now, some fans are saying, “Well, of course Elder Scrolls would be Xbox exclusive!” when I would imagine the opposite is true. Microsoft doesn’t want to miss out on 10-20+ million PlayStation sales. It didn’t even want to miss Call of Duty sales on its own platform, removing the new yearly release from Game Pass. To think that Elder Scrolls VI will mainly be distributed on Game Pass and not giving $70 ($80?) box copies to PS5, is a fantasy.We’re not even getting into the idea that there is no true Xbox-only exclusivity, as anything that comes to the console also comes to PC, and increasingly, cloud gaming. So even if you remove everything from PS5, you still do not have a console that has true exclusives, which has been true for ages now. Given where the platform is now, unless severe changes are made to its policies on exclusives, this will mean relatively little. And so many things are already in motion, with games heading to PlayStation, it’s hard to know when this may even bear fruit.Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.