Xbox's rival is TikTok? That's how you bury exclusives

When the head of Xbox's studios says your biggest rival is TikTok, you can read it as a bold vision of the future. We read it as something simpler: a polite way of saying the console war is over, and Xbox isn't going to fight it anymore.

Here's the context. In October 2025, Matt Booty, president of Xbox game content and studios, spoke to The New York Times just as Halo: Campaign Evolved was announced for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, with a 2026 release. As VGC reports, he said: "Our biggest competition isn't another console… We are competing more and more with everything from TikTok to movies." His argument is that consumers no longer feel a strong attachment to the devices they play on.

The TikTok line is a justification, not a strategy

The "we compete for time" idea isn't new. Kotaku points out that Reggie Fils-Aime said something very similar years ago. The difference is what Nintendo did with it: it doubled down on exclusive games and dedicated hardware. Booty draws the opposite conclusion from the same premise.

And that's where we think the argument gets shaky. If the enemy is the phone in your pocket, how does a remake of a 25-year-old shooter on PS5 help pull people away from it? Kotaku asks the same question. Our reading is that the TikTok framing is a nicer story than the one underneath it. Kotaku notes that, according to Bloomberg, Microsoft's mandate for much steeper profit margins at Xbox is the main driver of the multiplatform shift. Selling Halo to PlayStation owners is simply good business under that mandate. That's fair, but it's a different thing from "meeting players where they are."

The numbers back the move, and that's the uncomfortable part

We'll give Microsoft this much: the strategy works on its own terms. Between April and July, six of the top 10 best-selling games on PlayStation were Microsoft titles, and Forza Horizon 5 was among them, nearly four years after its original launch. Meanwhile, analyst Joost van Dreunen, quoted by ItemLevel, puts Series X|S at around 32 million units against an estimated 80 million for PS5. Selling hardware to win has not been working.

So the choice is easy to defend. For players, it's good news: more people get to play Halo, Gears of War: Reloaded and Forza without buying a second box. That's a real gain in choice, and anyone who still defends exclusivity as a virtue in itself should say who benefits.

But it isn't a free lunch. TheGamer notes that Nintendo and PlayStation still sell exclusives and haven't seen Xbox's sales decline. Exclusives may be dead for Xbox without being dead for the industry. That's an important difference, and Booty's phrasing quietly blurs it.

The open question is what an Xbox is for

If every game is everywhere, what is the box under your TV selling? Xbox's answer so far is the "everything is an Xbox" pitch, plus Game Pass, which got a 50% price increase for Ultimate in 2025, and consoles whose prices rose twice that same year, according to VGC. Sarah Bond has also promised a "very premium, very high-end" next-generation Xbox, which Kotaku notes will seemingly have games available everywhere else. Add the ROG Xbox Ally X at $1,000, and the pitch becomes: pay more for hardware whose games you could play elsewhere.

That could work as a luxury PC-like product. It could also be a brand turning into a publisher with a hardware hobby, which is exactly the fear TheGamer reports among fans. We think Microsoft is probably fine with that outcome, and the layoffs of nearly 9,000 people and cancellations like Perfect Dark suggest the priorities are financial first, identity second.

Verdict

Booty never says it outright, but we read his words as confirmation that exclusives are finished as Xbox's strategy. Enjoy the wider access, because it's real. But don't confuse a cost-and-margin decision with a vision about TikTok. Until Xbox can explain, in one sentence, why someone should choose its platform over any other, "we're everywhere" will remain an answer to where Xbox is, not to what it is.