The Verge claims to know the four games that Microsoft will be bringing to PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch.
If The Verge is correct, those games, by order of release, are Hi-Fi Rush and Pentiment, and then Sea of Thieves and Grounded. All four of these games fit the criteria that Phil Spencer shared in yesterday’s Xbox podcast to be eligible to go multiplatform, as we will elaborate below.
Phil described the criteria for choosing these games in yesterday’s Xbox podcast. Two of them are community driven games, AKA, they have online communities. The two other games are smaller games that were not meant to be platform exclusives. Basically, Microsoft’s dev teams wanted to build those games, and Microsoft supported those creative endeavors.
What all four games have in common is that these games are all over a year old, and original titles, AKA not sequels or spinoffs. They have been sold on Xbox and PC for a year or more, so they have ‘reached their full potential’ on those platforms, as Phil put it.
Hi-Fi Rush is the most prominent of these four titles. The rhythm action game from Tango Gameworks had a successful shadow drop in the first ever Xbox Developer Direct, and is also one of the most critically acclaimed titles of the year of its release.
Next to that is Sea of Thieves, the Rare live service co-op only multiplayer game. Sea of Thieves is a success in a different way. While it did not launch to critical acclaim or high sales, it has now both earned an active player base on Steam and Xbox, and received late recognition as the rare shot at the moon that paid off. Rare’s achievement is arguably more impressive than Tango Gameworks; it didn’t ‘deserve’ to succeed at launch, so it earned that distinction with Rare’s hard work, and their close connection with the game’s community.
Pentiment and Grounded are both highly experimental games from Obsidian, and could not be more different from each other. Pentiment is an adventure RPG where you play a painter in 16th century Europe, investigating a series of murders over an extended period of 25 years.
Grounded, on the other hand, is a survival game that can be played as an offline single player title, or as a cooperative multiplayer game. You play one of three kids, shrunk to the size of ants, who have to survive living in a backyard until you find out who shrunk you and how to come back (It wasn’t Rick Moranis).
These are all interesting titles, and it’s also just as likely that these games aren’t going to move the needle to bring masses of gamers to Xbox. That’s a good reason as any to port these games to other platforms, even heated rival PlayStation 5, and on the less powerful hardware of the Nintendo Switch.
What matters to Microsoft here are the PlayStation and Switch user bases, many of whom would likely buy the game if they could get them where they are playing now. Sony and Atlus are only learning just now the benefits of going multiplatform, but this is a dance that Microsoft has been on for much longer. They have been more successful at it too.
