It’s been over a year since Microsoft started their initiative to bring more of their first party games to competing platforms, such as the Switch and PlayStation 5. While most Xbox fans at this point have made peace that they may no longer have exclusives, Sony fans have been gloating at the prospect of getting all the games that are on Xbox.
But it looks like all that talk has been quite premature.
As reported by TheGamer, Obsidian has revealed on two occasions that they aren’t actually planning to port Avowed to more platforms. User Blacktuth_shared on the Avowed subreddit that he received this response from the studio when he asked about a PlayStation 5 port:
“Unfortunately, your attempts to bribe, kidnap, enchant, charm, and intimidate have all failed. I do appreciate the effort! There are no plans to launch on additional platforms at this time, but if that changes we’ll be sure to let players know.”
Subsequently, TheGamer reached out to Microsoft themselves to get an official response on their end. This was the response they received:
“Avowed is available on Xbox Series X/S, the Xbox app for Windows PC, Steam, Battle.net and with Game Pass. We have no other platform announcements.”
While it’s true that the window is not closed on a future PlayStation 5 port, we can be honest about the situation now. Obsidian wasn’t planning to make a PlayStation 5 version of Avowed at all. Given Microsoft’s response, it doesn’t look like they were interested in bringing Avowed to PlayStation 5 or mandating Obsidian to make the port, either.
What’s funny about this is that last month, Avowed’s game director Carrie Patel smiled when she was asked about the game having a PlayStation 5 port. Multiple outlets took this as a hint that a PlayStation 5 version was also in development. Some even thought that the port was going to be announced soon.
And so we return to some of what Microsoft’s leadership has said about their new strategy. There are no proverbial red lines anymore on what game can be ported from Xbox to other platforms. At the same time, however, Spencer said that there were games Microsoft already shipped that they won’t be bringing to those platforms. Many gamers took that statement for granted, but that was probably more important than we thought.
Here’s our reasonable interpretation of Spencer’s statement with added hindsight. Some games that Microsoft already shipped already had their budgets and development set and scheduled. While it seemed wort the effort to port Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to PlayStation 5, Microsoft has more games that won’t have guaranteed success on Sony’s console.
After all, Microsoft didn’t choose this new direction to make Sony gamers happy and their own gamers unhappy. So, there will be situations where it still doesn’t make sense for Microsoft to bring their games to PlayStation financially. Maybe in this case Obsidian already had other unannounced games in the works, or they used technology that would be prohibitively expensive to bring to PlayStation 5. Whatever the situation is, don’t be surprised if Xbox Series X|S still ends up with a substantial library of exclusives at the end of this generation.
