In a blog post and podcast today, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer made waves by confirming four Xbox exclusives will be going multi-platform. While he didn't reveal what those games would be, he did confirm a couple of games that won't be included in those four titles.
When asked directly by moderator and former IGN editor-in-chief Tina Amini if any of those four exclusives going multi-platform were Starfield or Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Spencer replied, "They are not Starfield or Indiana Jones."
Spencer, however, is still leaving Xbox's multi-platform options open. In an interview with The Verge, he stopped short of ruling out Starfield and Indiana Jones ever coming to PS5.
“I don’t think we should as an industry ever rule out a game going to any other platform,” he said. “We’re focused on these four games and learning from the experience. We don’t have work going on, on other franchises. But for anybody to stand up and say something’s never going to happen, I think it feels like creating more certainty in a world of gaming where you really want to respond to what customers want and what our players and creators are looking for."
Today's update comes after weeks of reports and speculation swirling about Xbox's future, particularly surrounding first-party exclusivity. Earlier this month, The Verge reported that Xbox was "weighing up which titles will remain exclusive and others that will appear on Switch or PS5 in the future." Indiana Jones, per the report, was being considered as the kick-off to this new strategy, with the possibility of it debuting on PS5 shortly after its launch on Xbox and PC this December.
Around the same time, XboxERA reported that Microsoft was considering releasing Starfield on PS5 shortly after the release of the previously announced Shattered Space expansion later this year. Other reports, meanwhile, suggested the Hi-Fi Rush and Sea of Thieves would be headed to other platforms.
So what are the four games?
We don't know what those four newly multi-platform games will be for sure at the moment. However, The Verge reports that they'll be Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, Sea of Thieves, and Grounded.
Spencer himself dropped a few hints during the podcast, saying they looked at games that were over a year old. Two of them, he said, are "community-driven games," "first iterations of a franchise that have reached their full potential, let's say on Xbox and PC."
The other two, he added, "are smaller games that were not really built to be platform exclusives and all the fanfare that goes around that, but games that our teams really wanted to go build."
"We love supporting creative endeavors across our studios regardless of size," he went on. "And as they realize their full potential on Xbox and PC, we see an opportunity to utilize the other platforms as a place to just drive more business value out of those games, allowing us to invest in future iterations of those, sequels to those, or just other games like that in our portfolio."
With that, let the speculation commence.
For more, check out everything we learned about Xbox's future today, including hints about the next-generation console.
