Francium34

The couple "troubled" exclusives have been rather ambitious/poorly thought out (depending on how you view it):

Scalebound was going to be an RPG from Platinum. I believe there was an IGN interview where the head said he always wanted to make an RPG, which means little prior experience. On top of that they (Platinum? more likely Microsoft? no idea) decided to tout 4-player co-op boss battles in some form as a major selling point.

The Phantom Dust remake was apparently jumping on the card game bandwagon, but with real time rendering of action (from the Kotaku post-humous article). Developer Darkside Games did not have a full game under their name.

Quantum Break probably was completely retooled as they struggled with how the game would integrate TV aspects (even the final product had a lot of complaints from gamers that didn't want to watch hours of TV).

Fable Legends was announced when the idea of asynchronous multiplayer was at its peak. Note I said "idea", because in reality few games have really stuck around. Since then, Evolve failed, Rainbow 6 Siege took a while to gain a rather small footing.

Crackdown 3, which according to Phil recently is looking great, was going to implement "the power of the cloud!!!tm".

Recore seemed like a slam dunk at the time, in concept and talent, but that was before Comcept turned into a burning trash can. I also suspect the Recore backlash might have deterred Microsoft from just putting what is done of Scalebound out to die.

Gigantic's development took so long that the MOBA heatwave AND the hero shooter heatwave came and went... Can't say I'm too optimistic about that one.

Even Sea of Thieves is really ambitious. Fingers crossed they pull it off.

New ideas are of course welcome, but much riskier to invest in as well. In many cases the developer also didn't have a track record of making the genre of game in question. (Things can certainly work out as well, such as Double Helix making a new free2play Killer Instinct) Microsoft is certainly at fault for a lot of the decisions, especially if the rumors of their requests to make abrupt direction changes are true.

I do wonder if they should just made a few safer "X" but in "Y" games. My examples would be Warhammer 40k space marines (gears with a slapped-on hot IP), and the Saboteur (open-world in WW2). Those 2 games are really not innovative (perhaps I'm giving them too little credit?), but I would be happy if Xbox has exclusives on that level. Even Naughty Dog is on a rotation of Uncharted and Last of Us. And the new God of War trailer was well-received by fans for its tone change. Horizon Zero Dawn is at its most fundamental an open world 3rd person action game, but the theme has been very intriguing. These are definitely overly simplified view of the games, and my point is not to belittle Sony's titles. Given how deeply entrenched Halo or Gears is in their respective fans' minds, 343 and Coalition might be better off making a new IP in a different setting, with freedom to try a couple new ideas (but not too back-to-the-drawingboard-ly new) without angering fans of Halo or Gears. Microsoft also had the unique problem of keep the Halo and Gears IP, but losing the original developers, hence their first couple games have been very standard entries in those series, almost as "training wheels". Hopefully Microsoft will let them (and us fans) take a couple years off from Halo, Gears and Forza.