During this past Gamescom did much fanfare the announcement of Xbox exclusivity of Rise of the Tomb Raider title, Square Enix/Crystal Dynamics that will come at the end of 2015 on Xbox 360 and Xbox. So far were not very clear though the contours of this exclusivity, with Phil Spencer who had explained that it was still an exclusive time-limited. But how long?

Today we discover, from a tweet of the Xbox Product Manager Aaron Greenberg in response to a user's question, that the game will be published by Microsoft Studios as if it were a title first party, exactly as happened previously with other exclusive third party Ryse and Dead Rising 3 . This allows us to understand that the Xbox exclusivity of the game will be quite extended: both games mentioned are in fact released on PC but not earlier than 10 months from the Xbox, and yet so far not on other platforms.

We can also expect that, as Microsoft will be involved as the game's Publisher, the strokes for all purposes as a first party title not only regarding marketing activities as well as involvement in the development, by providing support for their engineers to ensure that the title can take full advantage of the hardware of the console. Obviously this is just a guess, but we hope that is the case. Probably we will know more about during the E3 2015, or in the months immediately prior to the event.