X BOX ON PS5

Exclusive no more. Xbox first-party games are making the jump to PlayStation. But what does that mean for theseconsole competitors, and the industry at large?

Hi-Fi Rush. Sea Of Thieves. Grounded. Pentiment. Four innocuous videogame titles – or they would be, if they didn’t represent what might be one of the biggest industry shifts we’ve seen… ever. These four games were formerly Xbox exclusives, and now they’re coming to PlayStation.

Make no mistake, the white obelisks next to our TVs aren’t only competitors to Xbox, they’re the competitor in a way Nintendo Switch and PC aren’t. While we’ve seen Xbox games on PlayStation before, they’ve always felt like technicalities. Xbox bought

Minecraft after the phenomenon was everywhere – so why take it away? Likewise, Double Fine platformer Psychonauts 2 had been announced as multi-platform before the developer was bought by Microsoft, and had taken funding money from consumers with that promise. Similarly, Call Of Duty is too well established as multi-platform for loyal fans ready to spend money on their series of choice.

But none of that’s the case for these four, which have been Xbox exclusives since they were released, with no hint that would ever change. Until now. Talking about this move as more of an experiment, head of Xbox Phil Spencer calls it “not a change to our […] fundamental exclusive strategy.” However, like all experiments, by its nature it will inform the future. Especially as right after saying this during the announcement, Spencer stated he has “a fundamental belief that over the next five or ten years, exclusive games – games that are exclusive to one piece of hardware – are going to be a smaller and smaller part of the games industry.”