Microsoft plans to bring four games to PlayStation and Nintendo Switch, but won't tell us what they are. We have a few ideas.
It's official: Microsoft is breaking Xbox exclusivity on four games, and will release the titles on rival PlayStation and Nintendo platforms. Rumors have shed light on three of these titles, and based on what Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer said during the recent business update, it seems the reports are correct.
Two of the games are community-driven. That means a large playerbase, online gameplay, live service elements, and typically microtransactions. Reports said that Sea of Thieves is coming to PlayStation, and now it seems more increasingly like that Obsidian's Grounded could be the other community-driven title.
- Grounded - 15 million+ players lifetime
- Sea of Thieves - 30 million+ players lifetime
As for the other games, they are smaller-scale, and are likely:
- Pentiment
- Hi-Fi Rush
As for the rationale for the selection, Spencer says these games are at least 1 year old and have hit "full potential" on Xbox and PC.
"We looked at games that over a year old. So they've been on Xbox and PC for a while. A couple of the games are community-driven games, new games that are kind of first iterations of the franchise that have reached the full potential on Xbox and PC.
"These are franchises that we obviously want to continue to invest in. Part of having the ability to continue to invest is that the businesses behind those franchises continue, we think it's important to have service-based games that have communities behind them, that they can have confidence that they're going to exist in the future.
"Two of them are community-driven games that will end up on other platforms and give us the ability to continue to invest in them.
"Two of the other games are smaller games that were never really meant to be built as kind of platform exclusives and all the fanfare that goes around that, but games that are teams really wanted to go build.
"And as they realized their full potential on Xbox and PC, we see an opportunity to utilize other platforms as a place to drive more business value out of those games, allowing us to invest in maybe future iterations of those, maybe sequels to those, or other games like that in our portfolio.
"And we don't damage our business, we continue to grow Xbox using what other platforms have to help us with that, we're going to do that. And that's really the story behind these four games."