After a week in which the four Xbox games being ported to competing platforms were announced, questions have arisen again as to the potential exclusivity of the upcoming Xbox 1st party game Elder Scrolls 6.

Over the weekend, while appearing on the XboxEra podcast, Tom Warren, Senior Editor at TheVerge, stated he did not believe the upcoming Elder Scrolls game would be an Xbox exclusive.

The comments were part of a larger group discussion about Xbox exclusivity going forward following the Xbox business update podcast and quotes Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming, gave to Stephen Totilo of Game File.

"We’ve said from the beginning, of even the [post-deal-announcement] Bethesda... roundtable that we will take it on kind of a case-by-case basis," Spencer told Totilo. "We’re really focused on the best thing for the Xbox business, inclusive of platform hardware and games."

Such considerations would be in line with comments Spencer also made during the Xbox podcast regarding the future of exclusives.

"I do have a fundamental belief that over the next five- or ten-years exclusive games, games that are exclusive to one piece of hardware, are going to be a smaller and smaller part of the game industry," he said.

One game that Spencer has mentioned publicly regarding the negative effects of exclusivity is the recently released Sony console exclusive Helldivers 2, which also released Day 1 on PC.

“I will say, when I look at a game like Helldivers 2, and it’s a great game, kudos to the team shipping on PC and PlayStation, I’m not exactly sure who it helps in the industry by not being on Xbox," Spencer told Totilo. "If you try to twist yourself to say, like, somehow that benefited somebody somewhere....but I get it. There’s a legacy in console gaming that we’re going to benefit by shipping games and not putting them on other places. We do the same thing.”

When it comes to Elder Scrolls 6 though, leaked documents from the FTC court case regarding the Activision Blizzard acquisition would indicate an intent for the game to remain exclusive to Xbox.

According to an article published on The Verge in September of 2023, leaked documents indicate the game, which isn't expected to launch until 2026 at the earliest, isn't planned for a PlayStation release.

But shifting business strategies that include Xbox releasing former exclusives to other platforms, to Sony announcing last week PC support for their PSVR2 hardware, make predicting the future nature of exclusivity a daunting task.