Microsoft's Xbox team has in the past been criticized for a perceived lack of first-party exclusives compared to PlayStation and other competing platforms. But going forward, Xbox boss Phil Spencer doesn't believe that will be an issue. After acquiring studios like Obsidian, Double Fine, and Ninja Theory, and starting a new studio with the writer of Red Dead Redemption, Microsoft now has 15 Xbox Games Studios teams, all of which are developing content exclusively for Xbox and PC.

These studio acquisitions and formations came at no small expense, of course, and Spencer recently spoke about how this was made possible thanks to the leadership from Microsoft higher-ups believing in Spencer's vision.

"First-party content is really important to where we're going," Spencer said during a recent GameLab event. "It's important to our hardware platforms, it's important to things like Game Pass and our overall gaming strategy at Microsoft. As we got in place the new leadership team a few years ago, we started building our strategy and articulating our strategy internally to the company, it was really encouraging to see the support that we were getting from the board and the senior leadership team at the company to go and grow our first-party."