Xbox boss Phil Spencer recently told Bloomberg that the company has no “red lines” on which of its games can be ported to other consoles. Though Spencer said that it’s too early to say whether that means the next *gasp* Halo game will launch on Sony hardware, he also, notably, did not rule it out.
Given that Xbox has had success bringing Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, Sea of Thieves, and Grounded to other consoles — and that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is set to hit PS5 next year — it seems like Xbox is quietly entering its Sega-after-Dreamcast era. If that’s the case, and this pillar of the console industry is going to become a software publisher first and foremost, let’s drop the facade and do the thing that would make everybody happy: bring Game Pass to PS5.
Switch, too, and Switch 2 while we’re at it.
How Would PS5 Game Pass Even Work?
This would come with some obvious problems, especially at first. Many of the marquee Game Pass games aren’t available on PS5. No Halos, no Starfield, none of the games from Rare Replay, and none of the Elder Scrolls or Fallout games before Skyrim and Fallout 4. So, Game Pass on PS5 might, initially, need to be a bit bare bones, or supplement its offerings with Sony games. Given that Sony has its own subscription service in PlayStation Plus, that could be a bit of a sticky wicket.
But none of these issues are insurmountable, and with the right payout structure that fairly rewards Sony, Xbox, and the games’ developers, it seems like it could benefit all parties involved. In an ideal world, there would only be one Game Pass, where Sony and Xbox games could all land at launch. If I’m paying an increasingly steep monthly fee for Game Pass, it would be nice to not have to shell out for PS Plus, too.
An all-in-one subscription service is probably a pipe dream. But if Xbox is a service provider more than a console manufacturer, it needs to cut the crap and get those services everywhere subscribers want to use them. Consumers would like this, obviously. But subscription services have two key ways to bring in more money: raise the price or reach new subscribers. Xbox is already raising the price, and you can only push that so far before subscribers start peeling off. So why not let Nintendo and Sony players in on the fun?
If I can play Game Pass games on my TV and PC and smartphone, why not let me play them on my PS5 and Switch? Xbox already has a cloud streaming option, and both Sony and Nintendo support cloud-based gaming, so porting Xbox classics wouldn’t even be necessary. At least, not to get the ball rolling. Throw them up with a streaming option, then gradually make them available for download if the initial foray is successful enough to fund the ports.
There were rumors that Xbox would come to Switch years ago. That never materialized, and Microsoft games have only ever landed on the Nintendo console sporadically — a Minecraft here, a Sea of Thieves there. But, at this point, we should just rip the Band-Aid off. Let’s get Halo: The Master Chief Collection on Switch. Throw every Gears of War on PS5. Let me play the Rare Replay games on a Nintendo console like Conker intended. We’re on the verge of a future where platforms are no longer dividing walls between players. Let’s hurry up and get there.
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