Microsoft bringing Xbox games to PlayStation and Nintendo, amid major strategy shift

Microsoft recently made a big announcement regarding some of Xbox's games. Four games that were exclusively available on Xbox will soon be available on other consoles such as PlayStation and Nintendo. Microsoft also hinted at sharing more information about the next version of Xbox before the year 2024 comes to an end.

During a video podcast featuring various executives from Xbox, Phil Spencer, the CEO in charge of Microsoft's gaming division, refrained from mentioning which four titles he was referring to. However, he did mention that these games have been out for more than a year. Two of them are live-service games, while the remaining two are relatively smaller titles. It is possible that Sea of Thieves, a multiplayer pirate adventure, and Hi-Fi Rush, a musical action game, are the two games in question. It was made clear that Starfield, which was launched last year and the upcoming Indiana Jones game, will only be available on a single platform.

Microsoft has made a significant change in their business strategy by shifting their focus from selling hardware, like the Xbox, to increasing sales of their own games. In the past, Microsoft's consoles have struggled to compete with Sony's PlayStations since their first Xbox release in 2001. Sony's PlayStation 2, which is still the most popular games console of all time, outsold Microsoft's Xbox by a huge margin of 155 million units to 25 million units sold. Although the Xbox 360 initially outsold the PlayStation 3 when it was released in 2005, it later fell behind. When the Xbox One was launched in 2013, the company marketed it as a digital-first multimedia device, which failed to resonate with the core gaming fans and subsequently gave Sony's PlayStation 4 a boost in sales. At the end of that generation, Sony had sold more than 117 million PS4 consoles while Microsoft sold only 58.6 million Xbox Ones.

In 2017, Microsoft altered its approach and introduced the Game Pass subscription service for Xbox users. This service enables access to numerous games for a fixed fee each month, which is a model similar to popular streaming services for TV shows and movies. It has now grown to encompass 34 million subscribers. The majority of Xbox-exclusive games released from then on were available through the service, and two years later it was extended to include PC gaming as well.

Microsoft has been making a lot of big purchases lately, all in an effort to improve its gaming business. They bought Mojang, the creators of Minecraft, in 2014 for $2.5 billion, and then Elder Scrolls and Fallout studio Bethesda as part of Zenimax Media for $7.5 billion in 2020. Their biggest purchase yet was Call of Duty and Candy Crush publisher Activision Blizzard King for $68.7 billion in 2023, along with a few smaller studios. Xbox's president, Sarah Bond, announced on Friday that some of Activision Blizzard's games will be coming to Game Pass, starting with Diablo IV on March 28. Microsoft promised to keep Activision Blizzard's most popular games, like Call of Duty, available on other consoles during the acquisition process, which took several months due to legal and regulatory issues.

Bond restated that Microsoft has no plans of leaving the console industry and nixed speculations that have been circulating over the past few weeks. She revealed that there are some fascinating offerings in hardware that they will be unveiling this holiday season.