Xbox is denying that it currently has any plans to bring Avowed to PS5. This is despite rumors that Avowed will come to PS5 which mostly seem to be spread, not because of any cold, hard facts, but because, uh, why wouldn’t Xbox bring Avowed to PS5?
The Road Not Taken…
The company has been staking out a frustrating middle ground for the past year. If you play on PS5, cool, you can play some Xbox games like Hi-Fi Rush, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and Forza Horizon 5. But some Xbox games, like Halo Infinite and Starfield, are being held back as pure exclusives and there’s no rhyme or reason as to which games fall in which categories.
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The frustrating thing about this era of Xbox is that there doesn’t seem to be a game plan. When Nintendo doesn’t put Zelda on PS5, no one gets mad — well, except for children learning for the first time how console exclusives work — because Nintendo never puts games on PS5. Aside from the occasional mobile title like Mario Kart Tour or Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, Nintendo only puts Nintendo games on Nintendo consoles. If Nintendo is releasing a full-priced game, it’s only going to be on the Switch.
Even the mobile games aren’t ports of existing games. They’re bespoke releases designed for a mobile audience.
…For A Reason
The economics of this approach are understandable. Nintendo makes both games and hardware, and those two businesses are symbiotic. If it wants to sell consoles, it needs to make good games you can play on those consoles. If it wants to sell games, it needs to sell consoles you can play them on. Achieving only one side of the equation gets you the Wii U, a console that had good games, but which no one owned. When those games got ported to the Switch, a console that people actually had and liked, they sold really well.
It similarly makes sense that a publisher like Capcom, which doesn’t have its own console, puts its games everywhere. If you aren’t trying to sell a box, you want to put the games anywhere so people can play them for maximum potential sales.
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Even Sony, a company that doesn’t generally put its exclusives on competing consoles, continued to put games like God of War Ragnarok and Horizon Forbidden West out on last-gen hardware for longer than developers or PS5 owners wanted, because there were a ton of PS4s out there and that meant a bunch of potential sales. More consoles equals more sales, or at least, the possibility. The same goes for PC versions of said titles, it is going to head where the money is. So why doesn’t Microsoft?
So far, it hasn’t put Halo or Starfield on PS5, and that makes sense because it wants to use those big exclusives to sell as many Xboxes as possible. On the other hand, it’s putting Indiana Jones and Forza Horizon 5 on PS5, and that makes sense because it wants to sell as many games as possible. But those strategies are mutually exclusive.
If Xbox wants to sell as much hardware as possible, the tried and true way to do that is to make an Xbox console the one place where you can play the games. If it wants to sell as many games as possible, the tried and true way to do that is to put them on as many systems as possible. Doing both at once undercuts everything.
Every company has strategies that they follow behind the scenes. Some are publicly stated — like Sony announcing it had 12 live-service games in development a few years back — and some we have to work out by observing their behavior. Nintendo players may notice that it rarely puts its first-party games on sale, but Nintendo has never said, ‘We don’t put our games on sale.’
The issue with Xbox right now is that it is publicly stating that it wants to put its games in as many hands as possible, while privately concluding that this doesn’t apply to some of its biggest games. Everyone is confused. And uncertainty about whether anyone needs an Xbox is the last thing you want if you’re trying to sell Xboxes.
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