Gamescom 2024‘s Opening Night Live was a lacklustre event – but one announcement changed everythiong. As the event moved into its final few minutes, new footage of the extremely promising Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was shown, with an announcement that the game arrives in December, followed by a PlayStation 5 launch in Spring 2025. It signals a clear intent from Microsoft for Xbox to embrace a multi-platform future – and the response was mixed, to say the least. Change is always accompanied by uncertainty, but the Xbox strategy is coming into focus now and I think the choices are sound. However, questions surround the role of the Xbox itself – as a console – as the firm moves ever closer to full multi-platform publishing.
This change is driven by necessity and the reality of games development and publishing. On a general level, all of the major platform holders are grappling with the stark reality that the overall console audience has plateaued and in terms of the number of actual players, not much has changed since the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 generation. Meanwhile, the cost of making games has ballooned massively, with triple-A titles often requiring blockbuster movie-level budgets. From the cost of the Xbox Live subscription, through season passes, micro-transactions and Game Pass/PlayStation Plus, the industry has been able to increase revenues from those same players – but the cost of doing business continues to rise regardless.
This is one reason why Microsoft expanded the Xbox platform to encompass PC (a logical progression bearing in mind its Windows stewardship), while Sony has blurred the lines with first-party exclusivity with PlayStation titles, where – again – PC is seen as a lucrative growth prospect. Both firms are also invested to varying degrees with cloud gaming. Microsoft is taking things further though: the Indiana Jones PS5 announcement signals that Xbox games now operate on a timed window of exclusivity. Messaging from Phil Spencer suggests that more games will arrive on more platforms and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s all of them in due course.
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