Bethesda's Todd Howard has been doing the rounds today in a variety of interviews to promote the full launch of Starfield, and he had some particularly interesting comments to share about Xbox exclusivity with the BBC.
In recent years, there's been a lot of discussion around the decision to make Starfield exclusive to Xbox consoles and PC (and whether that's good thing or not), and Todd used the opportunity to highlight some of the positive aspects of it:
"When you're making something exclusive then the more you can focus."
"You know this is the hardware or the thing people are playing on, so the ability to focus on that always yields a better product. You do want people to be able to access it of course. But being with Xbox means there is an ease of access for us and I'm told we're expecting more people playing this launch than anything we've ever done before and that's despite the success of our previous games."
Howard also went on to point out that attaching brands to games is something that you see often — he used the example of Nintendo and Zelda — and he believes "there are times when that can be a real benefit."
The Starfield creator clearly has a bias in this situation given Microsoft's purchase of ZeniMax Media back in 2021, but nevertheless it seems the game's exclusivity isn't going to have a major detrimental impact on player numbers - as Todd mentioned, the team is "expecting more people playing this launch than anything we've ever done before".