Xbox’s Phil Spencer confirms four games are going multiplatform

Xbox today released an episode of its podcast in which it revealed more details about the future of the business. Tina Amini spoke with Phil Spencer, Sarah Bond and Matt Booty about the company’s plans. In addition to other details about its consoles and Xbox Game Pass, the three executives revealed that four Xbox-exclusive games are coming to other consoles. Spencer didn’t name the four games, citing developer plans to reveal the multiplatform releases. However, he specified that Starfield and the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are not among those four games.

Spencer gave a few clues as to which games are going to launch on the other consoles. He said two of the games were, “community-driven games that will end up on other platforms and give us the ability to continue to invest in them.” The other two 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 our teams really wanted to go build that we love supporting creative endeavors across our studios regardless of size.”

Based on those clues, the most likely candidates for the titles include Hi-Fi Rush and Pentiment for the smaller games, and Sea of Thieves and Grounded for the community-driven titles. Spencer described all four games as having reached their full potential on Xbox, adding that “we see an opportunity to utilize the other platforms as a place to just drive more business value out of those games.”

Spencer later added in an interview with The Verge that he’s not ruling out the possibility of those games coming to other consoles, but the four mentioned are the only ones on the docket right now: “I don’t want to create a false expectation on those other platforms that this is somehow the first four to get over the dam and then the dam’s going to open and that everything else is coming, that’s not the plan today. I also don’t want to mislead customers on those other platforms.”

Xbox’s plans for exclusives

In response to the question of whether multiplatform releases hurt Xbox, Spencer added, “I do have a fundamental belief that over the next 5 or 10 years, exclusive games, games that are exclusive to one piece of hardware, are going to be a smaller and smaller part of the game industry.” He said that this is part of a strategy Xbox has incubated for years.

Bond and Booty echoed his sentiments, with Bond saying that Xbox has a “our commitment to make Xbox, the Xbox experience, and the games that we build as widely available as possible.” Booty added that hardware platforms aren’t quite the draw that they used to be, saying, “As Phil mentioned, there are games today that you can play that only can be found on Xbox. And at the same time, we want to bring more of our games to more players.”

Amini noted that Xbox, by way of its more widely distributed games, is one of the top publishers on other consoles as well as mobile. Bond and Spencer spoke about how Xbox’s investments bring in developers who might otherwise be leery of developing for only one console, as they can get their games on multiple screens.

Spencer said, “That means healthy player community, healthy creator community, and healthy business. So when we look at opportunities to allow more people to play, more people to engage, more people to buy, more people to subscribe, it’s all about putting Xbox in the best position. And our hardware is a critical component of that. The absolute best experience somebody has on Xbox is hardware that our team builds and that people play on. But that’s not going to be everybody. We fully accepted that we’re going to have Xbox players across all kinds of devices.”