In the highly-anticipated Xbox Business update following weeks of dramatic rumors, Xbox officially announced that four first-party titles from the company will be heading to other platforms (meaning, PlayStation). Also, Starfield and the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are not among the four titles.
As for what the four titles actually are, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said in the podcast, “I’m not going to name those games. Those teams have announcement plans that are not too far away.” However, soon following the video going live on YouTube, reports published by The Verge suggest the titles in question are Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, Sea of Thieves, and Grounded.
These four titles align with the description provided by Spencer during the podcast. All of them were released at least one year ago. Two of them are community-driven games (Sea of Thieves and Grounded), and the other two are creative games of more limited scope (Hi-Fi Rush and Pentiment) that already did decent business on Xbox and PC.
Speaking about platform exclusivity going forward, Spencer said, “Just four games, not a change to our fundamental exclusivity strategy.” However, later on in the podcast, his statement might give us some indication of where the company is headed long-term:
“I have a fundamental belief that over the next five to 10 years, exclusive games – games that are exclusive to one piece of hardware – are going to be a smaller and smaller piece of the games industry.”
According to Xbox, the business vision behind going multiplatform is to acquire new players, rather than monetizing the set amount of existing players.
