The definition of the word “exclusive” has been stretched in recent years when it comes to video games. Timed exclusives, platform exclusives, console exclusives…there are a lot of different ways to say that a game is exclusive to one or more systems.

At the Microsoft E3 press briefing on Sunday night a new term was rolled out: console launch exclusive. It popped up a fair few times as Microsoft showed off its 46 games. But no-one had any idea what it actually meant.

Head of Xbox Phil Spencer has moved to clarify the meaning behind “console launch exclusive” – it’s basically the same thing as a timed exclusive, but with a bit more specificity (apparently):

“Console launch exclusive means the first console the game will launch on will be Xbox One. I don’t know, honestly, anything about when those games are going to launch on another platform. It’s really up to the developer to do the work to make that happen.

These are games that will launch first on Xbox… some of these are already out on PC, so that’s why we chose the term that we did.”

So there you have it. It’s a timed exclusive that might be a console exclusive – the game will launch on Xbox One before any other console and it’s up to the developer to work on launching on another.