When Xbox CEO Asha Sharma called Gears of War: E-Day an “Xbox console exclusive” during the recent Xbox Games Showcase, plenty of gamers were left wondering what that actually meant.

Now, Xbox Chief Content Officer Matt Booty has cleared things up. According to a new interview (via GameInformer), “console exclusive” simply means the game won’t launch on PlayStation. It will still be available across PC storefronts and Xbox Cloud Gaming, keeping Microsoft’s broader ecosystem strategy intact.

That’s an important distinction because Xbox’s approach to exclusives looks very different from what it did a decade ago. Rather than locking games solely to Xbox hardware, Microsoft increasingly treats PC and cloud services as extensions of the Xbox platform. If you can access Xbox Cloud or play on Windows, you’re still considered part of the ecosystem.

The strategy reflects comments Sharma made earlier this year. Xbox wants its games to reach massive audiences as one of the world’s biggest publishers, but it also recognizes that exclusive content remains important for strengthening the Xbox brand.

The result is a title-by-title approach where some games stay away from PlayStation while others may launch across multiple platforms.

Gears of War: E-Day appears to be one of the first major tests of that strategy. While Microsoft isn’t abandoning PC players, it is drawing a clearer line when it comes to Sony’s platform.

Whether more Xbox franchises follow that path remains to be seen, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that modern Xbox exclusivity is less about hardware and more about ecosystem loyalty.