In case you missed it, Xbox's top dogs set live a podcast yesterday, publicly announcing the company's long-rumoured intention to bring a selection of first-party games to rival consoles. After so much noise around the subject, it hardly came as a surprise, but it's still a noteworthy shift in how the platform holder will handle its in-house titles going forward. While the messaging was kept fairly vague, we can get a touch more context from a company memo, sent from Phil Spencer to staff before the podcast's debut. It's now available to read in its entirety online.

The Verge has secured a copy of the memo, which reads as follows:

Today at noon Pacific, we’ll be posting a special episode of the Official Xbox Podcast.

In this episode, Sarah Bond, Matt Booty and I will share with the community our plans for the future of Xbox. We’ll also discuss how our vision will benefit our players, creators, and the industry as a whole.

When we look at the state of our medium, we see players increasingly gaming on multiple devices, but their experience is defined by the fragmentation created by platform silos. Multi-device players have to navigate multiple identities, entitlement libraries, communities, wallets, and reward programs. Similarly, the industry’s biggest franchises increasingly ship across multiple devices, requiring creators to build and manage multiple instances of their games, leading to higher costs and fragmented communities. All of this friction creates a tremendous opportunity for us to meet the needs of multi-device players and creators.

We have a different vision for the future of gaming. A future where players have a unified experience across devices. A future where players can easily discover a vast array of games with a diverse spectrum of business models. A future where more creators are empowered to realize their creative vision, reach a global audience, unite their communities, and succeed commercially. A future where every screen is an Xbox.

This is a future where Xbox is everywhere—consistent with our promise to empower players to “play the games you want, with the people you want, anywhere you want.”

This is reportedly the first communication to Xbox employees about where the company is heading. It's also a little more direct in its language than the podcast, talking quite plainly about "a future where Xbox is everywhere", and where "every screen is an Xbox". It all seems to be in service to a scenario in which gaming becomes more unified, instead of "defined by the fragmentation created by platform silos".

Anyway, the result is that four unnamed Xbox games (to begin with) will be ported to PlayStation. These are widely thought to be Sea of Thieves, Grounded, Pentiment, and Hi-Fi Rush. Bigger games, such as Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, aren't currently planned for ports, but haven't been ruled out, either.

Posted: Feb 23, 2024 12:54 pm
Related Forum: Xbox Forum

Source: https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2024/02/xboxs-everywhere-future-outlined-in-company-memo-from-phil-spencer