Xbox is going through some changes. The company officials have said that they are going to bring more Xbox games to other systems, most likely the PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch. These two systems are much more popular than the Xbox Series X/S, which is thought to have only shipped 27 million units. In comparison, 54.8 million PS5s and nearly 140 million Switches have been sold.
This week on the Official Xbox Podcast, Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming, talks about how his team is bringing four games to “the other consoles.” It was said before that Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle would be going to PS5 and Switch, but he didn’t say what games they were. It has been said that Hi-Fi Rush, Sea of Thieves, Halo, and Gears of War will be among the games that cross the great gap.
Spencer did say that the Xbox games that are going to PS4 and Switch have been out for at least a year on Xbox and PC.
“A couple of the games are community-driven games, new games, kind of first iterations of a franchise that have reached their full potential, let’s say, on Xbox and PC—tthere’s always growth, franchises that we obviously want to continue to invest in,” he stated.
Two of the other games are smaller ones that were never meant to be platform-exclusives, with all the hype that comes with that. Instead, they were games that our teams really wanted to make, and we love supporting creative projects across all of our studios, no matter how big or small they are, Spencer said.
Now that they’ve reached their full potential on Xbox and PC, we see a chance to use the other platforms to get more business value out of those games. This will allow us to invest in future versions of those games or just other games like them in our portfolio.
Spencer said that Xbox won’t say for sure that they will port other games to more systems besides those four right now. People who play games on “those other platforms” shouldn’t think that every Xbox game will be released on those systems. Instead, he said that his team would look at how well the first four games did and decide what to do next.
Spencer said that this doesn’t really mean a change in approach, though. Xbox has always wanted its users to be able to access its games from anywhere, including through the cloud. Sneaking onto other systems is just one way that the company does this.
Our goal is to make these games available to more people so that they have a bigger impact and reach. This will also help us to invest in either new versions of these games or other first-party games, according to a blog post on Xbox Wire. Our attitude toward exclusivity hasn’t changed in a big way.
Matt Booty, President of Game Content and Studios at Xbox, said on the show that first-party Xbox games will still be added to Game Pass on the same day they come out and that “Game Pass will only be available on Xbox.” Even so, Booty said that Microsoft does want more people to be able to play its games.
At the same time, Sarah Bond, President of Xbox, told fans that Microsoft has no plans to leave the console hardware company. The team even has “some exciting hardware stuff coming out that we’re going to share this holiday.” In the past, Leaks showed that Microsoft was working on a digital version of the Xbox Series X that would work better with Wi-Fi and use less power.
The next Xbox is also on Microsoft’s mind. We’re also putting money into the plan for the next generation, Bond said. “And it’s really our goal to make the biggest technical leap you’ve ever seen in a generation of hardware. This will make it better for players and for creators and the ideas they’re working on.”
A leak from September of last year said that the next Xbox would come out in 2028 and handle “cloud-hybrid games.”
The gaming business of Microsoft is not at all what it was a few months ago. The company finally finished its long-awaited $68.7 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard in October, adding a lot of new employees in the process. Microsoft told the public in January that it was firing 1,900 people from its game teams. It also scrapped at least one game, a survival game that Blizzard was making.
The purchase of Activision made Microsoft’s gaming division much more profitable right away, but the company still wants to make that part of the business more profitable. One way to do that is to cut down on staff. According to some, selling games to new audiences on other platforms is a better strategy, even if it means losing some Xbox fans who used to love the brand.