Xbox Survey Asks: How Would You Feel About More Exclusives?

How would you feel if the next Fallout or Elder Scrolls never came to PlayStation? That's the question Xbox is reportedly putting to some of its most dedicated fans right now.

According to Windows Central, select Xbox Insider members have received surveys probing their feelings on game exclusivity. The questions reportedly ask where you'd play certain titles—or whether you'd play them at all—if they weren't available on PS5 or Switch 2. Among the games name-dropped: Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, and Physint, the upcoming Hideo Kojima project that Xbox Game Studios recently agreed to publish after Sony cancelled it. Kojima himself has said he doesn't know if Physint will release on PlayStation.

But the eyebrow-raiser is the final question. It asks players to imagine a world where every Xbox game—except Call of Duty, which Microsoft is legally required to keep multiplatform until at least 2033—was an exclusive. Then it adds a kicker: for Minecraft only, existing titles would no longer be available for purchase on PlayStation or Nintendo consoles, and would not receive any new content updates.

Let that sink in. Minecraft is an evergreen juggernaut that has sold over 425 million copies and attracts 300,000 new players every day. The Switch version alone has sold over 4 million physical copies in Japan, and the PS4 version had over 17 million players as of 2019—a number that's surely grown since a native PS5 version didn't arrive until 2024. Pulling it from those platforms would be a backlash of epic proportions.

This all comes amid Xbox's wildly shifting exclusivity strategy. After buying Activision Blizzard and Bethesda, Microsoft went full third-party publisher for a while, bringing nearly everything to PS5. Then new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma took over, and the winds changed again: Gears of War: E-Day was confirmed as Xbox and PC only, despite reports its PS5 port was nearly done. Fable, however, is still set for a PS5 launch.

Obviously, this is just a hypothetical survey for now—nothing is set in stone. But the fact that Microsoft is even floating the idea of yanking Minecraft from millions of players is enough to make anyone nervous. It's one thing to keep a new RPG exclusive; it's another to cut off updates for one of the biggest games on the planet.

So, what do you think? Would you be okay with more Xbox exclusives, or does the Minecraft question cross a line? Let us know in the comments.