"Games that are exclusive to one piece of hardware are going to be a smaller and smaller part of the game industry," says Phil Spencer.
After a couple weeks of rumors, Xbox diehards were bracing for cataclysm today: Was Microsoft really going to announce that it’s going to give up on Xbox console exclusivity—or even consoles themselves—and start releasing its big games, such as Starfield, on PlayStation 5? It turns out: No, not really.
Xbox boss Phil Spencer did announce on today’s Official Xbox Podcast (embedded above) that four Xbox exclusives will be releasing on PlayStation 5 and Switch, but none of them are Starfield or Bethesda’s upcoming Indiana Jones game.
Spencer wouldn’t identify the games, except to say that they’re all at least a year old, two of them are “community driven” games whose growth potential now lies off Xbox, and two are smaller games that “were never really meant to be built as platform exclusives.”
Sources tell The Verge that the games are Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, Sea of Thieves, and Grounded.
This isn’t quite Sonic appearing on a Nintendo console for the first time, although it does feel like we’ve come to a point where there’s no longer any question that console exclusivity is nearing its end as a business model.
“I do have a fundamental belief that, over the next five or ten years, exclusive games—games that are exclusive to one piece of hardware—are going to be a smaller and smaller part of the games industry,” Spencer said on the podcast.
But we’re not there yet, even if the consoles are basically PCs at this point. Microsoft isn’t giving up on Xbox hardware.
“There’s some exciting stuff coming out in hardware that we’re going to share this holiday,” said Xbox president Sarah Bond, “and we’re also invested in the next-generation roadmap. And what we’re really focused on there is delivering the largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation.”
Microsoft also announced today that Diablo 4 will come to Xbox and PC Game Pass on March 28. It’s the first Activision Blizzard game to make the jump to Microsoft’s subscription service after the acquisition.
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