Microsoft shook up the gaming world on Thursday by announcing it would release four titles from its Xbox ecosystem on external platforms. CEO Phil Spencer explained the decision during a podcast hosted by the company’s leadership team, and he said that it was being made with the long-term health of Xbox in mind. He added that this includes increasing its user base and reaching gamers on other consoles.
The first game to leave the exclusive Microsoft fold is reportedly Hi-Fi Rush, which will be released on PlayStation and PC in March. Pentiment, Sea of Thieves, and Grounded will follow it. According to sources who spoke to The Verge, these games weren’t intended to be built as platform exclusives, and they will benefit from the opportunity to reach more gamers. Spencer also confirmed that the upcoming Activision Blizzard title Diablo IV will be available on outside consoles, making the Xbox Game Pass catalog more diverse.
In the same podcast, Spencer said that Microsoft was still committed to releasing its games as Xbox exclusives but that it believed that over the next five to ten years, “games that are exclusive to one piece of hardware are going to be a smaller and smaller part of the industry.”
Microsoft’s gaming division has been struggling for some time. Its hardware sales lag behind Sony PlayStation, and its online service, Game Pass, faces competition from rival services such as Amazon Prime and Netflix. The company aims to increase its market share with the acquisition of Activision Blizzard and by bringing Xbox games to PlayStation.
The software maker also outlined several new projects that it is working on, including a robot designed to help blind people navigate through the world and a virtual assistant that can translate speech into sign language. The company also recently launched a new streaming service for Xbox called Mixer, which lets users host and attend virtual events.
Despite the recent turbulence, Microsoft’s gaming revenue has grown in the past year. In its fiscal fourth quarter ended in October, revenue from gaming increased 61 percent to $57.2 billion, driven by the popularity of Xbox games and its streaming services. During the same period, revenue from its Azure business — which offers cloud-based services to other companies and consumers — rose by 80 percent to $32.6 billion. This revenue was enough to beat its Azure cloud competitors, such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.
