Xbox’s near-term future means at least four Xbox exclusives coming to PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch, Xbox leadership announced Thursday on the official Xbox podcast.
Xbox boss Phil Spencer did not share those four games, but said that the respective developers will announce them themselves. But according to The edgethose are the games HiFi rush And Pentiment first followed by Sea of thieves And Grounded. Spencer said Starfield And Indiana Jones and the Big Circle Are not included in the four games. But Spencer also said he expects the number of exclusive games to continue to decline over the next five to 10 years.
“Today there are big competitions like Roblox or Fortnite could actually be bigger than any platform,” said Matt Booty, head of Xbox Games Studio. “And that has really changed the way we think about things.”
The discourse surrounding Xbox exclusivity has disappeared from the charts since rumors surfaced in January that Tango Gameworks’ HiFi rush went multiplatform, followed by reports that Sea of thieves could come to PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch. When news reports revealed that Microsoft’s big game from 2023 Starfield and it’s coming Indiana Jones and the Great Circle were considered for PlayStation 5, all bets were off. The “console war” culture of recent decades has left video game players hooked their specific console, and many people who invested in Xbox were upset by the sometimes overly dramatic speculation about what could be happens at Microsoft and Xbox.
The reality of the announcement isn’t actually that surprising: Microsoft has been publishing games on various platforms and consoles for years Minecraft, for example. The company has also published the most games on Windows PCs in recent years, in addition to Xbox consoles. Including Activision Blizzard in the $68.7 billion merger is another step toward its multiplatform future: Call of Duty will remain on all platforms, as discussed during the Federal Trade Commission hearings. Microsoft has made no secret of the fact that it wants its games to be playable by as many players as possible: “Our mission is to bring our first-party experiences (and) our subscription services to every screen where games can be played,” Tim Stuart, Xbox Chief Financial Officer said in November. Xbox Game Pass is a big part of that vision.
Of course, that doesn’t mean Xbox Game Pass is coming to competitor consoles; Microsoft even said during the event that this would not be the case, according to Microsoft. “We (…) come back to some core principles,” Booty explains. “First, that all our games will be on the Xbox platform. Second, all of our games go to Game Pass on day one. And third, we know that Game Pass will only be available on Xbox.”