Rumor has it that Microsoft plans to launch at the least 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 that they’re being betrayed after years of loyalty to Microsoft’s console. Possibly 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 probable transfer to me. In recent times, Microsoft has centered on shopping for fashionable and prestigious recreation builders—Obsidian, Bethesda, Activision Blizzard—and rising its Recreation Cross subscriber base. To get the Activision buyout performed, it appeased regulators partially by pledging to not make Name of Responsibility an Xbox unique collection, 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 may see it relenting as enthusiasm for the sci-fi RPG dies down and it stops attracting new Recreation Cross subscribers.
The PC, after all, already received the console wars, as we have beforehand joked (but in addition meant type of severely). Microsoft began releasing all its Xbox console exclusives on PC years in the past now, and prior to now couple years began releasing them on Steam as an alternative of simply the annoying Microsoft Retailer. And though it nonetheless typically 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 implications of its recreation studio acquisition spree are nonetheless enjoying out, and the latest information has been unhealthy: Microsoft simply laid off 1,900 gaming workers, many from Activision Blizzard, and canceled a survival recreation that had been in growth at Blizzard for years.