One More Go

Last week Xbox announced that first party Microsoft titles will soon be available on competitor platforms. They stopped short of naming which games will be available where, though in this week’s Nintendo Direct, both Grounded, a live service “Honey I Shrunk The Kids”-’em up, and Pentiment, Obsidian’s 16th century murder mystery, were announced for the Nintendo Switch, and rhythm platformer Hi-Fi Rush, and Rare’s live service swashbuckler Sea Of Thieves have since been revealed to be on their way to PlayStation 5. Games that have been out in the wild for a little while already, so it’s unlikely we’ll start seeing first party titles launching simultaneously on multiple platforms in the immediate future, but with the differences between consoles growing smaller and smaller, giving up exclusivity of any kind could be seen as a risk.

Console exclusivity is a phrase that’s becoming more and more fuzzy. We’ve already started seeing both Microsoft and Sony publish games on PC, though in the case of Sony usually several years after a game’s initial release on PlayStation. Minecraft is another example of a game that is owned by Microsoft and playable on all platforms, however, when Microsoft acquired Minecraft it was already everywhere, so it would have been a tricky exercise in PR to lock it exclusively to Xbox and PC. Similarly, with this latest announcement, I think Microsoft will have a hard time justifying why some games see a wider release, while others remain exclusive. We already know that Microsoft are in the process of acquiring Activision, the home of Call of Duty, and are the proud owners of Bethesda, locking titles such as Starfield exclusively to Xbox and PC. Surely those games will eventually make their way on to other platforms too, presumably after the sales begin to slow down or the number of Game Pass subscribers start to plateau.

Releasing games more widely could also be seen as an exercise in bolstering player counts and brand recognition. For both Sea Of Thieves and Grounded an injection of new players is always going to be welcome, keeping the world and activities within those games populated and enticing. Pentiment and Hi-Fi Rush on the other hand are both excellent games, but are a little niche. Outside of heavy discounts they’ve likely sold what they were expected to, but re-releasing them on other consoles can give all of these games a bounce in sales, extending their lifetimes, but also creating more of an appetite for games developed by those studios. Pentiment, in particular, is like few other games I’ve played, and I would be super excited to play anything else Obsidian creates in that vein. Making your first party exclusives more visible, particularly in competitor store fronts, can only be a good thing, likely encouraging consumers to consider a subscription to Game Pass where they’ll have access to even more games at a similar price.

For consumers I think it’s great news. Having games relinquish their console exclusivity means that it will be easier than ever to play a wider range of games and at discounted prices. Hopefully Microsoft’s experiment sees some success, opening the way for a wider range of first party titles or even Sony to follow suit. There is already talk about the PlayStation 5 entering the end stage of its lifecycle (only 3 years since release), and I’m sure Sony will be considering whether consumers have the same brand loyalty and expendable income to justify another expensive device, or if they too can eke more reward from their existing line up of exclusives.

There has been a lot of alarmist discussion suggesting this could be the beginning of the end of Xbox hardware, or even console gaming more generally, but ultimately, I think it’s quite exciting. Xbox, in recent years, have been trying to disrupt convention either through their extensive support of backwards compatibility, bringing their games to Game Pass on the day of release, and are now planning to release games on competitor consoles. Sony and Nintendo both have subscription services now, and both offer ways to play iconic titles from their history. Maybe one day we’ll be able to play their games on any device too.