After weeks of rumors about its strategy regarding Xbox console exclusives, Microsoft announced today that it is “going to take four games to the other consoles.” But the company stopped short of announcing what those now non-exclusive games would be, saying that neither Starfield nor Bethesda’s upcoming Indiana Jones and the Great Circle would be appearing on other consoles.
“The teams that are building those [multi-platform] games have announced plans that are not too far away,” Xbox chief Phil Spencer said, “but I think when they come out, it’ll make sense.”
The move, announced in an “Updates on the Xbox Business” podcast video, does not represent “a change to our fundamental exclusive strategy,” Spencer said. We’re making these decisions for some specific reasons,” he added, citing “the long-term health of Xbox” and a desire to “use what some of the other platforms have right now to help grow our franchises.
All four of the soon-to-be multi-platform titles are “over a year old,” Spencer said. The list includes a couple of “community-driven” titles that are “first iterations of a franchise” that could show growth on non-Xbox consoles, as well as two others that Spencer said were “smaller games that were never really meant to be built as kind of platform exclusives… I think there is an interesting story for us of introducing Xbox franchises to players on other platforms to get them more interested in Xbox.”
Spencer cited the recent expansion of multi-platform releases in stating “a fundamental belief that over the next five or 10 years… games that are exclusive to one piece of hardware are going to be a smaller and smaller part of the game industry.”
And Xbox hardware will continue to be the “developer target” for these Microsoft-published games, according to Microsoft’s Sarah Bond. “Our developers can build the specs of our hardware, and we invest to make sure when they do that the games are going to run great on our hardware, but they’re also going to be able to be accessed across any screen because of all the other investments we make.”
This is a developing story and will be updated with more information
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