Third-Party Publishers Reportedly Uncertain Why They Support Xbox

Microsoft Xbox fans were in for quite a fright not too long ago. A slew of rumors hit the web suggesting that Xbox was bowing out. There wouldn’t be new consoles, and first-party titles would launch on competitor platforms, and it really painted a doom-and-gloom picture. Now, a new report suggests there are even more disheartening comments made from third-party publishers. 

Thanks to VGC, we’re finding out that a recent comment by Gamesindustry.biz’s Chris Dring suggests that Microsoft is in trouble. Chris’ podcast episode spoke of his time at GDC last week where he managed to speak with a couple of publishers. It’s not stated who these publishers were, but apparently, there were similar comments from a big-name publisher with a major release last year, along with a smaller publisher. 

Apparently, the larger publisher that released a major port for the Xbox stated that they don’t know why they bothered supporting the Xbox Series X/S platform as the market for their company is PC and PlayStation 5. Others have apparently chimed in with similar comments, which might make things even harder for Xbox as it attempts to compete against the likes of PlayStation and Nintendo. 

Meanwhile, we have seen recent comments from GDC by Phil Spencer about portable gaming. So, there could be some kind of hardware announcement from the folks at Xbox that deals with portable gaming later this year. At any rate, we’ll have to wait and see if Xbox can weather the rough waters right now. 

Of course, we know that Xbox is not afraid to bring some former exclusives to competitor platforms. It was just last month that we got word of four games coming to competitor platforms. They might not be massive releases, but the games that are finding their way on rival platforms are Grounded, Pentiment, Hi-Fi Rush, and Sea of Thieves. It would be interesting to see if other first-party games land on rival platforms if Microsoft begins to see fewer games being ported to their platform.