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.
- 0:00:00 Introduction
- 0:00:58 News 01: Indiana Jones headed to PS5
- 0:19:53 News 02: Hands-on with STALKER 2
- 0:31:31 News 03: FF16 demo tested on PC!
- 0:47:13 News 04: Black State impresses
- 0:57:50 News 05: Gamescom Opening Night Live highlights
- 1:06:45 News 06: Nvidia’s Gamescom announcements
- 1:19:14 Supporter Q1: Is disabling RT depending on the scene a good idea?
- 1:27:47 Supporter Q2: Is Series S preventing a Black Myth: Wukong release on Xbox?
- 1:34:33 Supporter Q3: Why did Wukong on PS5 use FSR and not TSR?
- 1:38:35 Supporter Q4: Could improved Wukong performance be a good selling point for PS5 Pro?
- 1:45:06 Supporter Q5: How will Microsoft differentiate the next Xbox?
- 1:52:21 Supporter Q6: Did Microsoft and Sony focus on the wrong features with PS5 and Xbox Series?
- 2:01:18 Supporter Q7: Is 12GB enough VRAM for graphics cards this generation?
It all makes sense. Microsoft’s acquisition strategy has effectively made it a de facto multi-platform publisher – possibly the biggest in the world. A game like Minecraft could never become an Xbox-exclusive. The sheer scale of Activision Blizzard King, not to mention the budgets behind Call of Duty, makes Xbox exclusivity for those games a non-starter. Bethesda? The question is the extent to which Starfield‘s Xbox exclusivity enhanced the Xbox brand or diminished the return on what would have been a huge investment. Either way, from my perspective at least, taking a multi-platform publisher like Bethesda and enforcing exclusivity doesn’t quite feel right. Maybe Xbox management feels the same, as Phil Spencer often talks about getting games played by as many people as possible, no matter what systems they own.
The general direction of travel in the business, combined with the increased return on investment from multi-platform publishing just makes good business sense – but where does this leave the Xbox console owner? There’s an argument now that states that PlayStation owners will get all the games, while Xbox owners won’t. A procession of bad headlines has painted a picture of decline around the Xbox business – even though Microsoft’s figures suggest only a very small downturn, and even then, only if you factor out Activision Blizzard King revenues. Add them in and it’s in rude health.
Meanwhile, Phil Spencer is careful to stress that overall console users in the ecosystem have never been higher, which suggests two things. Firstly, Xbox owners who have extensive digital libraries are staying with Xbox, and the same will be true in higher numbers on PlayStation, of course. Secondly, there are still a hell of a lot of Xbox One players out there – and we know this is also true on PlayStation with the recent revelation that 50 percent of PlayStation users are still on PS4. Will Indiana Jones and other Xbox games arriving on PlayStation change the status quo? Perhaps for a die-hard minority, but the impact to the overall ecosystem will likely be more limited.
There is a hardware challenge, however. Sony will have a PlayStation 5 Pro soon and Microsoft has no plans for an enhanced Xbox Series console. But what we are getting – remarkably – is messaging from Xbox on new hardware, even though leaked documents revealed a roadmap leading up to a 2028 next-gen release. The 2028 plans are out-of-date, it’s said, and in time, the ‘real plan’ will emerge. Phil Spencer has repeatedly talked about handhelds and he’s mentioned the idea of competing stores on Xbox hardware – all of which suggests that PC and Windows have a big part to play in the console space.
We’ve discussed this a lot on DF Direct, but if that is the plan, it has merit – Valve’s Steam Deck is the perfect example of a fully viable console built on an existing, non-console operating system and we’re already starting to see the arrival of Windows enhancements that make Xbox gaming more viable on PC handhelds.
In the short term though, there is the thorny issue that Sony consoles – principally, PS5 Pro – will be hosting Xbox games that run better on PlayStation than they do on Microsoft hardware. With that in mind, the sooner there is clarity on next-gen hardware, the better. Remember, Xbox president Sarah Bond has mooted the “biggest technological leap ever seen in a generation” – another jigsaw piece we need to slot into the Xbox hardware strategy puzzle. Microsoft has laid out its ambitions which would have been challenging enough to achieve by 2028 but the fact that the firm is talking about hardware at all right now does suggest the schedule has changed.
But change is good – and from my perspective as a journalist, the events of the last week are actually very exciting. Microsoft is looking to disrupt the status quo and the Xbox team is clearly not afraid to make controversial decisions that amount to a complete rethink of console strategy. Nothing is off the table and while risky, it must be liberating for Microsoft too. We know where the software side of the business is heading and while there may be title-by-title tweaks, we now have a precedent on how multi-platform blockbusters will be handled. Xbox as a platform is evolving – and as Phil Spencer says, we should expect more change. But if the platform is evolving, where does that leave the hardware? I’m looking forward to finding out.
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