An Xbox multiplatform plan shouldn’t be surprising fans as much as it is
“We’re listening and we hear you,” Xbox head Phil Spencer wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday, without being specific about what he’d been hearing. “We’ve been planning a business update event for next week, where we look forward to sharing more details with you about our vision for the future of Xbox. Stay tuned.”
There are a few things Spencer could have been talking about. These are turbulent times for Microsoft’s gaming arm, which in the past few months completed its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the biggest game industry deal ever, and then announced 1,900 layoffs.
However, Spencer was certainly addressing mounting disquiet among Xbox fans after a series of leaks said that console-exclusive Xbox games made by Microsoft-owned studios would go to competing platforms.
The news cycle began early in January, with a rumor that Microsoft was set to release an “acclaimed” first-party game on a rival system. Consensus quickly settled on Hi-Fi Rush, Tango Gameworks’ lively rhythm action game, coming to Nintendo Switch. Swift on the heels of this came reports that Microsoft had considered releasing Rare’s knockabout pirate sim Sea of Thieves on PlayStation, and perhaps Switch.
The Xbox community was in an uproar at these reports, but this was just the start. On Feb. 1, files on cosmetics datamined from a Hi-Fi Rush update appeared to confirm that the game was indeed coming to both Switch and PlayStation. Then, over the next weekend, there was a deluge of reports about much higher-profile Xbox games going multiplatform. Starfield, the Bethesda space epic and last year’s marquee Xbox game, was said to be coming to PlayStation 5. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, probably this year’s marquee Xbox title, might also come to PS5 after a relatively short Xbox exclusivity window. So, unthinkably, might Gears of War, a series more closely associated with the Xbox brand than any other bar Halo. (There have been unsubstantiated rumors of the latter going to
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