After weeks of leaks and rumors, Xbox finally cleared things up about its business strategy through a special edition of the Official Xbox Podcast. The podcast featured Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming who was joined by Xbox’s Sarah Bond and Matt Booty who spoke about the console’s exclusivity, the future of hardware, and much more.
The executives had several announcements for the players who were desperately looking for an update from the company. Xbox revealed that it aims to bring more games to a larger audience across the world and announced that it plans to work in that direction, keeping players in mind.
Xbox to Bring More Games for More Players Around the World
While talking about the first-party game and Game Pass during the podcast, Matt Booty, said that a lot has changed in the industry where the platforms were bigger and games would “tuck in” but it has now changed and some games are bigger than a platform, mentioning Fortnite and Roblox as examples.
He said that this has changed the company’s perception and mentioned some “starting points” for first-party titles. Matt stated that all its games will be coming to the Xbox platform, will go to Game Pass on day one, and Game Pass will only be available on Xbox before further adding:
There are games today that you can play that only can be found on Xbox. And at the same time, we want to bring more of our games to more players. So we’re going to continue to look at that.
This could see the first-party games coming to Xbox consoles go to other platforms after being exclusive to console and PC for a while, just like 4 games going multi-platform that according to Spencer have “realized their full potential” on these platforms.
What Does This Announcement Mean for Players?
The company wants to focus on taking the games to a larger audience with this announcement and Matt Booty also mentioned that it provides two important things for players, cross-play and cross-save which are important features in games these days, and often games come with this.
Matt added that this will help the company to “deliver on the promise of Xbox,” which is to “play with your friends where they are, play on the devices you want, play the games you want.” He also said that they are fundamental to the company’s vision and it gets benefits from being close to the platform.
This kind of pushes the “play anywhere” strategy of the company in the future but it did not reveal it at once and would like to ease slowly into things. The announcement of Activision and Blizzard games coming to Game Pass was also made, starting with Diablo 4‘s arrival on the service on March 28. This could mean that COD games are also coming to the service in the future.
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