Xbox breaking exclusivity to 'see what happens'

Microsoft today confirmed it will bring four unnamed first-party Xbox games to PlayStation and Nintendo Switch. The rationale? It's basically a big experiment to see what happens.

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Microsoft just paid $75 billion for Activision Blizzard King, and despite making consistently strong revenues every year, Xbox gaming hasn't met its internal metric guidelines. Couple this with lukewarm reception for big first-party games like Starfield, potentially stagnant subscription growth, lower console sales, and universally rising costs, and you have a recipe for lower profits (and maybe even losses).

Now Microsoft wants to try doing something more safe: Selling games. That's why the company plans to bring four Xbox games onto PlayStation and Switch. The games haven't been announced yet, but Xbox's Phil Spencer did talk about the thought process of this decision with The Verge's Tom Warren:

"These are games that originally launched on Xbox. They were Xbox-branded games and we want to see what happens, because going and doing the development work to bring them to new platforms is real work.

"We want to make sure that the return makes sense. We want to make sure the audience that's there has an appetite - maybe they don't.

"We'll also watch what happens on Xbox as well. Our goal would be that the communities of those games grow, they grow and they thrive, but we'll see. We'll see what happens when we take games that launched originally on Xbox and PC and bring them over to other consoles, other closed platforms. We don't know."