Xbox Exclusives Take So Long for This Specific Reason
High expectations for graphics and details make the wait for Xbox exclusives so long as developers perfect their work.
One of the biggest points of criticism of the current generation of gaming consoles is the overall lack of exclusives compared to previous generations, most specifically, the seventh generation of consoles, which was almost exclusively exclusive—pun intended. Well, Microsoft just stated why Xbox exclusives take so long to make because of today’s high standards for graphic quality and the overall gaming experience.
According to Kotaku, the head of Xbox Game Studio, Matt Booty, recently stated that the whole gaming industry is still catching up with the new reality that gaming projects nowadays just take longer to develop. Games have become infinitely more complex compared to two decades ago, with new technologies such as 4K resolution, ray-tracing, and other graphical improvements making the game more graphically believable and more difficult and expensive to develop. This is particularly true for both Sony and Xbox exclusives, which seek to showcase the power of their native hardware.
Modern games, such as Xbox exclusives, take longer to develop because the bar for graphical fidelity and the fandom’s expectations just continue to rise. All the details have to be done right because the fandom expects it. The bodywork of a car has to be done right, with all the lighting and light reflection coming off the car’s body, which is quite reasonable for a racing game. But the fans are now expecting such level of details from, let’s say, first-person-shooters whose sole focus should lie on combat aspects and not the graphical fidelity of transport vehicles.
Furthermore, the use of aforementioned technologies in games actually changes how the assets for Xbox exclusives are made. Instead of the simple light reflections we saw in decades-old games, we now see detailed reflections on various surfaces, the wrinkling of shirts during movement, and the glistening sweat on the protagonist’s brow. All of that stuff has to be coded, rendered, and delivered, not to mention the fact that gamers demand an ever-increasing number of interactions within a single gaming title whose narrative should ideally span 100 hours.
The fact that the gaming companies still want to deliver and meet the fandom’s expectations doesn’t actually help, and with the developers paying attention to every minute detail and aspect of the game, it isn’t actually all that surprising that triple-A gaming titles now spend five, six, or maybe more years in active development. Starfield, an upcoming Xbox exclusive, has been in development for over eight years now, and Microsoft has already delayed the title a few times, trying to polish things out and meet the fandom’s expectations.
There are plenty of other examples that back up Booty’s claim about games taking longer to develop, even beyond the scope of Xbox exclusives. Ghost of Tsushima took six years to develop, and Final Fantasy XVI—scheduled for June 22—is arriving seven years after its predecessors. When it comes to Microsoft, well, we saw the new Fable trailer, which has no release date, of course, but other Xbox exclusives, such as Gears 6, are still nowhere to be found or even heard of. With that said, the new Summer Game Show did introduce a whole slew of upcoming, highly anticipated hits.
