The last 10-days-or-so have been quite the roller coaster for Xbox fans. Team Green was thrown into turmoil earlier this month by rumors that everything from Starfield, to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, to even Gears of War may be going multiplatform. Granted, some of those rumors were later walked back, but still, the spectre of a third-party future for Xbox was raised.
Thankfully, today Xbox leadership Phil Spencer, Matt Booty, and Sarah Bond stepped up to provide some clarification on the latest episode of the Official Xbox Podcast. Ultimately, the news wasn’t quite as apocalyptic as some Xbox owners feared, but Microsoft’s gaming business is going to be seeing some changes going forward. If you’d like to listen to the business update yourself, you can do so below.
So, the headline news – what’s happening regarding Xbox exclusives? Well, contrary to rumors, Starfield and Indiana Jones and The Great Circle are not going to PlayStation or other platforms. That said, four games are making the jump. Spencer wouldn’t say which specific games are going multiplatform, although he did provide some hints. All of them are over a year old, and are either “community-driven” live service titles or smaller games that weren’t really designed to sell consoles. Based on those descriptions, existing rumors, and basic logic, it seems likely Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, Sea of Thieves and possibly State of Decay 2 or Killer Instinct are our culprits.
Beyond those four multiplatform games, Spencer says they’re not promising anything else. For now at least, this is a one-off experiment and not a “fundamental change” in how Team Green looks at exclusivity, although nothing is being entirely ruled out.
“I don’t think we should as an industry ever rule out a game going to any other platform. We’re focused on these four games and learning from the experience. I don’t want to create a false expectation on those other platforms that this is somehow the first four to get over the dam and then the dam’s going to open and everything else is coming. That’s not the plan today.”
Further, Matt Booty made some promises about future games in development – all games will be on the Xbox platform, all of those titles will go into Game Pass on Day 1, and Game Pass will only be available on Xbox. Presumably, Booty was talking about Xbox Game Studios titles here, not Activision Blizzard games, which are coming to Game Pass but may not be Day 1 releases.
Now that the dust has settled and we actually know what Microsoft’s plans are, what do you think about the future of Xbox? Is this the right pivot to make?
