Whatever your opinion on the current console war between Xbox One and and PlayStation 4, even the most devout Microsoft fans can’t deny that Xbox has fallen way short of PlayStation this generation when it comes to single-player exclusives.
Where the PlayStation 4 has seen massive critical and commercial acclaim with the likes of Bloodborne, Uncharted 4, Marvel’s Spider-Man, God of War, and Horizon: Zero Dawn, Xbox One has… not really matched that output.
That’s not to say there haven’t been some great single-player gems on Xbox One. Sunset Overdrive is fantastic, and Cuphead is one of the best games of the generation, but the consistency of exclusives hasn’t quite been there.
Fortunately, it sounds as if all that might be about to change. If Microsoft’s recent spree of acquiring a huge number of third-party studios wasn’t enough of a clue for you, Xbox boss Phil Spencer recently took to Twitter to assure fans that single-player games will be a big focus for the company going forward.
Responding to a curious fan, Spencer wrote “Yes, I can confirm” more single-player games, adding that thanks to “the additions to XGS [Xbox Game Studios] we have a lot of teams that have built strong SP focused games and we want that to continue.”
Given the huge success in recent years of single-player games like Resident Evil 2, God of War, and Marvel’s Spider-Man, it makes sense that Xbox would want to start investing more energy into exclusive single-player, narrative driven content.
The vast majority of studios Microsoft has picked up over the last year or so are predominately well known for single-player games, including Ninja Theory (Hellblade), Obsidian (Fallout: New Vegas), and Double Fine (Psychonauts 2).
With all these acquisitions, it’s clear Microsoft has no intention of letting the next generation of Xbox go the same way as the current-gen. The future of single-player Xbox titles is incredibly promising, and I can’t wait to see exactly what we’ve got in store.
In the more immediate future, we know Halo Infinite is arriving for Xbox One, Scarlett, and PC during Holiday 2020, and there’s a Fable game in development from Forza studio Playground Games which hasn’t actually been confirmed, but we all kind of just know it exists at this point.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.