Xbox is still dancing around the topic of exclusivity in a new interview with CEO Asha Sharma.

Speaking during a live interview, Bloomberg’s journalist asked Sharma how Xbox intends on handling exclusive games in the future.

It is a carefully worded answer, and probably deliberately so. Sharma does not say Xbox exclusives are going away, but she also does not suggest Microsoft is returning to the old-school model where first-party games were automatically locked to Xbox forever. Instead, her comments point toward a more flexible, title-by-title approach: some games could remain exclusive, some could launch elsewhere, and some could potentially follow a timed exclusivity model where Xbox and PC players get them first before they arrive on competing platforms later.

“I think it’s a tough topic. Look, we’re the number two publisher in the world and in order to be a great publisher, you must have your games reach large audiences to play. At the same time, we’re increasingly becoming a platform. In order to be a platform, you must have exclusive content and services. And so, we’re looking at that very closely. I think that we have to be very thoughtful about each title on how we want to think about it and learn from similar cases in the industry. and that’s what we’re doing.” – Asha Sharma

It’s a typically word-salad approach to answering the question, the kind you expect of a CEO. It says a lot, without actually saying anything concrete.

In essence, there’s an underlying tension: you want exclusives to encourage people to buy your hardware, but to be the 2nd biggest publisher in the world, your games need to be everywhere.

Personally, I think we’ll see more timed exclusivity, a bit like what is currently happening with Forza Horizon 6.