Once upon a time, the idea of an Xbox exclusive like Halo or Gears of War gracing a rival’s platform was unthinkable. It’s like when you boot up The Master Chief Collection on PC then decide to play with a DualSense controller; something about it just feels incredibly wrong.
I grew up in a household where I owned a PS2 while two of my older brothers had the Xbox and Nintendo GameCube, meaning console war battle lines were drawn between us by our parents whether they realized it or not. It saw me grow up on a steady diet of games that in normal circumstances you couldn’t play anywhere else, but as one of nine kids, there was always a new game somewhere in the house to sink into.
Console Exclusives Mean Everything And Nothing All At Once
But favoritism remained as one brother cheered on the brilliance of Super Mario Sunshine while the other lauded Halo 2 over our heads, while I was perfectly happy with the masterful Final Fantasy 10 and the laundry list of other JRPGs that graced Sony’s platform. Like myriad other gamers from back then, we developed favourites, and with each generation to follow it was natural to gravitate towards a console where the games we loved the most called home.
But those lines have blurred in recent years as countless classics from yesteryear are ported and remastered, while triple-A development has grown so costly and prolonged that keeping games confined to a single console limits sales and creates greater financial risk, and so you are going to end up porting things over to PC or going multiplatform. We’ve seen this happen with major franchises like Final Fantasy, but otherwise, PlayStation and Xbox both stubbornly held the line. Nintendo is off doing its own thing, so let’s ignore it for the time being.
Sony saw fit to release PC versions of Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, Days Gone, and a selection of other modern titles, but months after the console experiences, safely knowing all of these games had already attracted sizable communities all their own. A PC version was a bonus, not a lifeline, and they were always marketed as such. The same goes for properties like Horizon suddenly appearing in Lego form on Nintendo Switch, a partnership which isn’t designed to take away from the pull PlayStation has as an exclusive powerhouse.
Move over to the Xbox pastures and the story couldn’t be more different. Since the debuts of Xbox Play Anywhere and Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft has committed to providing all of its exclusives on Xbox and PC at the same time, a philosophy complicated by the arrival of the Xbox Series S and yet another technical SKU to account for.
You weren’t selling additional versions of games on multiple platforms, you were giving them away as part of a service which promised to build an unstoppable ecosystem. As that vision fell apart however, Microsoft was left trying to pick up the pieces and again turn Xbox into a console that boasted games you wanted to play, either through pouring money into massive studio acquisitions or spearheading the return of fan favourite IP like Fable and Perfect Dark.
Those games could deliver, but reports claim that conversations are already being had about Halo, Gears of War, Microsoft Flight Simulator, and other big hitters making the jump to PS5.
What Happens When Xbox Leaves Halo Behind?
NateTheHate and Windows Central’s Jez Corden reported last week that Halo is planned to come to both PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2 later this year, likely in the form of the Master Chief Collection as a way to collate most major games in the series on new platforms. Other titles were mentioned, including Microsoft Flight Simulator and Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, all showing that Xbox has potential plans to bring large swathes of its back catalogue to other platforms.
When Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, Grounded, and even Indiana Jones and The Great Circle were announced for PS5, it felt like Xbox was deliberately holding its most precious IP back. All the games which make Xbox what it is being hoarded on Microsoft’s console alone, knowing that if you cross that line onto rival hardware there’s no going back. Once we reach the point of no return, there will be little justifying Xbox as a physical console anymore. It will be a service, a developer, and a publisher that is heavily present on other platforms with little interest in maintaining its own.
This is a product of its inability to compete over two console generations and Game Pass reaching a plateau that is seeing it lose more money than it makes, so much so that porting to other platforms is a necessity in order to break even and justify the existence of countless experiences.
This was always the ultimate destination for Xbox, and I’d argue it was set in stone after the underwhelming launch of Starfield that many believed would change its fortunes for good. It did the opposite, and now Xbox is staring down the barrel of a future where it abandons the console business altogether and continues as a service provider/third-party publisher similar to Sega after the death of the Dreamcast. That is a future that could still be lined with ample success, and perhaps it will put Microsoft in a position to make bigger and better games.
Xbox Series X
Launched in 2020 in conjunction with the Xbox Series S digital-only console, the Series X is the disc version of Microsoft’s premier gaming platform.