Xbox Survey Asks Players About Making Fallout, Elder Scrolls and Minecraft Console Exclusive

Microsoft is asking Xbox players whether they’d buy into its console again if its biggest franchises stopped coming to PlayStation and Nintendo. A survey sent this week to some members of the Xbox Insider Program floats making future Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, DOOM, Diablo and even Minecraft games exclusive to Xbox consoles. Windows Central obtained the screens and says it verified they’re real.

It’s a survey, not an announcement. Microsoft hasn’t said it plans to change anything, and the questions are written as hypotheticals.

The biggest question goes all the way. “Imagine it was announced that all future title releases from every XBOX-developed gaming franchise except Call of Duty will be console-exclusive to XBOX,” it reads. Respondents pick whether they’d go back to an Xbox they already own, buy a new one, move to PC, or skip those games.

Minecraft gets the toughest version. In that scenario, existing Minecraft games would come off sale on PlayStation and Nintendo consoles and stop getting content updates there. Anything you already own stays playable, and PC isn’t touched at all.

Call of Duty is the one carve-out, which fits the 10-year commitments Microsoft made to Nintendo and others to get the Activision Blizzard deal approved. Other questions in the survey go franchise by franchise and ask about timed exclusivity as well as permanent exclusivity, according to Windows Central.

The timing stands out. Last week Xbox CEO Asha Sharma reportedly told staff the platform “will not survive” without new IP, and console hardware is already selling poorly, with US sales at new lows as prices hit records.

Our read: Pulling Minecraft off PlayStation and Switch would be the most drastic move in this survey by a wide margin, so treat that question as Microsoft testing how far it could push, not as a plan. The more realistic outcome is timed windows on a few tentpoles like The Elder Scrolls VI or Fallout 5, which would sell Xbox consoles without throwing away Microsoft’s PlayStation revenue. Companies run surveys like this all the time, but the fact that Microsoft is asking at all, two years into going multiplatform, tells you the current strategy isn’t selling hardware.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report