Rumor has it that Microsoft plans to launch no less than a few of its Xbox console exclusives on PlayStation 5. This Thursday, we’ll discover out if it is true.
Microsoft gaming boss Phil Spencer acknowledged the rumors final week and introduced that he’d reveal Microsoft’s “imaginative and prescient for the way forward for Xbox” this week. We have now realized that the announcement goes to occur on the Official Xbox Podcast this Thursday, February 15.
A podcast feels a bit low key as a venue for such a hotly anticipated chat; some Xbox diehards are apoplectic over the concept they’re being betrayed after years of loyalty to Microsoft’s console. Perhaps hypothesis has overblown the quantity of change coming, or possibly Spencer and firm hope to downplay it.
Bringing Xbox video games to new platforms does look like a possible transfer to me. In recent times, Microsoft has targeted on shopping for widespread and prestigious recreation builders—Obsidian, Bethesda, Activision Blizzard—and rising its Sport Move subscriber base. To get the Activision buyout executed, it appeased regulators partially by pledging to not make Name of Obligation an Xbox unique sequence, so it is already put its recreation growth aspirations forward of its {hardware} aspirations in a single occasion.
Microsoft did withhold Bethesda’s Starfield from the PlayStation 5 after shopping for the studio, however I might see it relenting as enthusiasm for the sci-fi RPG dies down and it stops attracting new Sport Move subscribers.
The PC, after all, already received the console wars, as we have beforehand joked (but in addition meant type of critically). Microsoft began releasing all its Xbox console exclusives on PC years in the past now, and up to now couple years began releasing them on Steam as an alternative of simply the annoying Microsoft Retailer. And though it nonetheless usually places months or years between its console and Home windows releases, Sony additionally began releasing PlayStation exclusives on PC. The PlayStation-published Helldivers 2 is doing nice on Steam proper now. Nintendo is the one holdout.
Nonetheless, Microsoft’s energy within the trade makes Thursday’s announcement related to everybody. The results of its recreation studio acquisition spree are nonetheless taking part in out, and the current information has been dangerous: Microsoft simply laid off 1,900 gaming staff, many from Activision Blizzard, and canceled a survival recreation that had been in growth at Blizzard for years.
