During tonight's Future of Xbox event, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer announced that four Xbox games would be launching on new consoles, and while he wouldn't be drawn on which four Xbox exclusives will be making the jump to other platforms, we can take a pretty good guess based on what Spencer said.
We do know for certain that Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, two titles that were rumored to be upcoming PS5 games, aren't included in the group of four. Spencer directly squished those rumors, and later went on to say that all of the first games coming to new consoles are more than a year old. That takes out any 2023 releases, like Starfield, Forza Motorsport, or Redfall.
Spencer confirmed that he's not telling us which games are making the multiplatform jump just yet – that'll be up to the developers of those projects. But we do know that in addition to their age, some of the games are "community-driven," and that they've "reached their full potential on Xbox and PC."
That points to Sea of Thieves and Grounded as the most likely candidates, two games that are certainly community-driven thanks to their service-based multiplayer design, and are old enough that if you haven't picked them up on Xbox or PC yet, you probably weren't planning to. With no further room to expand those audiences within its current ecosystem, it seems likely that Microsoft would look to push them elsewhere.
The other two games "are smaller games that were never really meant to be built as platform exclusives [...] but games that our teams really wanted to build." Those, combined with reports from earlier in the week point to Hi-Fi Rush and Pentiment.
The latter launched in 2022, while the former has just ticked over its first birthday, lining it up for that age criteria. They're both smaller experiences, and have both been labelled passion projects by their respective developers; Hi-Fi Rush studio Tango Gameworks is best known for horror games, so its surprise pivot into the loud and colorful Hi-Fi Rush was certainly a departure; and Pentiment has basically been described by its director, Josh Sawyer, using exactly the words 'passion project'.
Of course, we won't know for sure until the individual announcements come along, but those four titles are certainly the best fit for the criteria that Spencer has offered. Given that he's also discussed a desire to use these ports to help keep the studios involved in good financial health, we're also much more likely to be talking about these smaller games than anything major, like Gears of War or Halo coming to PS5.
Elsewhere, Microsoft is already teasing its console future, with a suggestion that we'll see more later this year, but also the promise that its next machine will offer "the largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation." Those are certainly fighting words, but we'll likely be some way away from watching that battle play out.
