As part of Microsoft’s “Updates on the Xbox Business” podcast that aired on February 15th, Phil Spencer outlined Xbox’s future exclusivity goals. The exaggerated rumors about Xbox completely abandoning exclusivity have been dispelled. More specifically, Spencer confirms that Starfield and Indiana Jones are not coming to PS5 just yet.
Starfield Still Xbox Exclusive…For Now
The main topic during the start of the Official Xbox Podcast business conversation was four Xbox exclusives going multiplatform. The interviewer asks, “can we say if any of those titles are Starfield or Indiana Jones?” To which Phil Spencer responds, “they are not Starfield or Indiana Jones.”
This means that at least for the next fiscal year or so, Starfield is not coming to other platforms outside the Xbox family. But Spencer doesn’t outright rule out a future where Starfield and Indiana Jones are on PlayStation. Later in the podcast, Spencer says, “I don’t think we should as an industry ever rule out a game going to any other platform.”
What Are the Four Games Going Multiplatform?
What we do know is that four games will lose their Xbox exclusivity and will come to PS5 and potentially Nintendo consoles. These four games aren’t named specifically, but it’s not hard to narrow down the possibilities based on what was said in the Xbox podcast.
Phil Spencer says, “they’re over a year old,” and that “a couple of the games are community-driven games…first iterations of a franchise.”
So, we know these four games are over a year old and at least two of them are live service multiplayer experiences. To narrow it down further, these games are not part of an ongoing franchise. Here are our guesses as to what these four games are based on the above criteria:
- Sea of Thieves
- Grounded
- Pentiment
- Hi-Fi Rush
Xbox’s Future
During the Xbox podcast, Phil Spencer clarified that “there’s really no fundamental change to how we think about exclusivity.” But then, goes on to say,
“I do have a fundamental belief that over the next five or ten 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,”
My takeaway from this Xbox business podcast is that Xbox desperately wants to let go of its exclusivity to bring a wider audience to its studio’s games, but at the same time wants to hold out a little longer. They’re dipping their toes in the waters of multi-platform and testing to see how it pans out with a selection of four games to start. Whether we’ll see Starfield and Indiana Jones on PS5 in the next couple of years is anybody’s guess, but Xbox is certainly shifting their tune on exclusivity from their E3 days.
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