More Xbox first-party games will come to PlayStation and Nintendo — Xbox hardware will remain

Since Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision-Blizzard and its smorgasbord of development studios, Microsoft (and thus Xbox) has become the largest third-party game publisher ever. So, recent comments from Xbox head Phil Spencer in an interview with Gamertag Radio indicating that forthcoming Xbox games will be released on other platforms, including Nintendo and PlayStation, have caused a large ripple but also make a lot of sense.

These statements (“I want people to be able to experience the games that we build, the services that we offer on as many devices as we can” and “We obviously love the native experience that we have on our own platform and our own hardware, and that’s something that will continue for us”) come from Danny Peña’s Podcast Interviews on YouTube, where he and Parris of Gamertag Radio discussed the future of Xbox with Phil Spencer. The twenty-six-minute interview is chock-full of industry insights and nostalgia on older periods of Xbox history, including the original Xbox and 360 eras.

Now, a small brief on console history is needed for those who don’t know why these statements are controversial. You know Sonic The Hedgehog? The movie character? That guy’s actually from a long line of sometimes-beloved and sometimes-hated video games. Until Sonic Adventure 2 got a GameCube port, those video games and many others were always exclusive to Sega consoles. Dreamcast was the last Sega home console, and unfortunately, was met with a quick death at the hands of Sony’s far more powerful PlayStation 2, quickly relegating Sega to a mere third-party developer…whose place in the market was swiftly taken by Microsoft’s Xbox.

In the earliest stages of the “DirectX Box” that would eventually become the first Xbox, the system maintained backward compatibility with Sega Dreamcast titles (it likely helped the Dreamcast was already compatible with Windows CE). While the final system did not keep this functionality, several Dreamcast-era sequels, like Jet Set Radio Future, were released exclusively for Xbox.

These comments may initially sound like the dying words of a flailing, failing console manufacturer, but Microsoft, at large, is a much greater beast than that. Now that Xbox has become the de facto largest third-party game publisher of all time, the focus is shifting toward selling as many games as possible rather than forcing players onto the Xbox platform.

As Phil Spencer says, “We want everybody to be able to play on Xbox and it does mean more of our games shipping on more platforms, not just PlayStation. We love the work that we do with Nintendo, we love what we do with Valve on Steam, and that’s going to continue.”

So, is Xbox going the same way as Sega? Absolutely not— Microsoft’s big wallet has made sure of that. However, the next generation of Xbox consoles is going to need to offer a lot to bring people based on hardware versus the (likely) hybrid portable focus of “Switch 3” and the sure-to-be-yet-more-powerful PlayStation 6, which will both be sold based on their exclusive titles, as is tradition for the console business.

But if Microsoft isn’t careful with the idea that Xbox is not a hardware platform but rather a collection of games and services owned by Xbox, well, “When everybody’s on Xbox, no one will be.”