Bethesda
Bethesda's Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the latest game from a Microsoft subsidiary that will make its way to the PlayStation 5. The game will arrive on Sony's console in spring 2025, Microsoft announced yesterday, months after a planned December launch on Xbox Series S/X and Windows.
In an interview with YouTube channel Xbox On, Microsoft's Phil Spencer expanded on that decision, implying that multiplatform releases for Microsoft gaming properties were important to the Xbox division's bottom line. “We run a business,” he said, “It's absolutely true that within Microsoft, the bar is set high for us in terms of the delivery that we have to give back to the business, because we get a level of support from the business that is just astounding in what we're able to do.”
Phil Spencer's comments come about three minutes into this interview.
Amid the mass layoffs that have hit Xbox and other gaming companies in recent months, Spencer noted that there is “a lot of pressure on the [game] “industry” nowadays.[The industry] has been growing for a long time and now people are looking for ways to grow,” he said. “And I think that we, as fans, as players of games, just have to anticipate more change in the way that some of the traditional ways that games have been built and distributed [ars] is going to change… for all of us.”
“It will just be a strategy that works for us”
Although Microsoft released four former Xbox exclusives on other platforms months ago, Spencer suggested there hasn't been a commensurate decline in overall Xbox usage. “What I see when I look is our franchises are getting stronger; our Xbox console players are as good this year as they've ever been,” he said.
“So I look at it and I say, ‘Okay, our player numbers are up on the console platform, our franchises are stronger than ever… So I look at this [as] “How can we make our games as strong as possible?” Our platform continues to grow, both on console, PC and in the cloud, and I think that's just a strategy that works for us.”
Microsoft
Microsoft has long prioritized maintaining a healthy Xbox player base overall over selling more raw consoles than rivals like Sony. Still, the continued decline in Xbox hardware sales revenue likely plays a heavy role in Microsoft’s decision to release its games on competing platforms.
A big budget, big name Bethesda release like Indiana Jones could serve as more of an Xbox system seller than the four older, smaller games Microsoft recently released multiplatform. But then again, The Great CircleThe multiple months of Xbox exclusivity (including the 2024 holiday season) could still give Microsoft's consoles a relative advantage.
Indiana Jones and the Great CircleThe PS5's availability may come as a surprise to readers who remember Spencer saying in February that neither The Great Circle yet Star field were part of the company's current multiplatform plans. But a careful analysis of Spencer's words at the time shows that he only promised that those titles would not be among the four multiplatform titles they announced at the time.
Spencer said at the time that those four multiplatform releases didn't represent “a change in our fundamental exclusive strategy.” But he added that there was a desire to “use what some of the other platforms have now to grow our franchises” to “help the long-term health of Xbox.”
“[I have] “A fundamental belief that over the next five or 10 years… games that are exclusive to one piece of hardware are going to be a smaller and smaller part of the games industry,” Spencer said in February.
