Xbox Studios Boss Wants to Be “More Consistent” With Its PS5 Release Timing in the Future
At this past week’s Xbox Showcase, Microsoft confirmed what we all knew was an inevitability, and that’s Xbox first-party games releasing simultaneously on PS5 alongside the Xbox and PC versions.
While Fable is set to release day-and-date on the PS5 alongside the Xbox Series X|S and PC versions, Forza Horizon 6 won’t be. Sure, it’s confirmed to be hitting the PS5, but there’s no release date yet, and chances are, it won’t be until at least a few months after its initial launch.
That looks to be changing soon, too — at least according to someone higher up at Xbox.
Xbox Studios Boss Admits Xbox Game Releases on PS5 Are Inconsistent
Speaking an interview, Head of Xbox Game Studios boss Craig Duncan talked about the strategy of releasing games on the PS5 to further expaned the community, stating, “You know, I was running Sea of Thieves at Rare when we took it to PS5, and as we migrated from Xbox to PC to PlayStation, we saw more players come in and we saw the community around the game grow. Forza Horizon 5, which launched on PS5 last year, did really, really well. It helped the community around that game grow – it gives everybody more people to play with. For me, this strategy is really about how we can have our games reach as many people as they can.”
When it was pointed out how confusing it was that some Xbox gmaes are releasing day-and-date on PS5, such as Fable, while some titles such as Forza 6 are releasing at a much later time on PS5, Duncan mentioned how they want to be more consistent on how they do things moving forward.
Dunanc noted, “There’s always development realities about when these projects start – how big a team is, and what plans we have at the start of development. Like you said, when a strategy changes, maybe you’ve got a plan that exists with a game and maybe you can adopt that, maybe you can’t. So that’s why. And to be clear, this is totally fair feedback. Sometimes we are inconsistent. You see some games in one place, some games in multiple places. Just know that we’re going to work on that, and we’re going to try and be more consistent with what we do.”
“But you know, for our game makers, if you’re on the Fable team you just want as many people who love Fable to appreciate the great work that the team’s doing. That’s always our goal. It’s rarely more complicated than that. It’s like, how can we get this game to as many players as we can?, Duncan added.”
If I had to hazard a guess on Xbox’s strategy on multiplatform releases, it wants to release its established games on PS5 at a much later date, since there is a chance said game can move more Xbox hardware. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if all Xbox games are released on PS5 on the same day they’re released on Xbox and PC.
Whatever the decision Microsoft makes on the release timings on Xbox games headed to PS5, I think we can all agree that Xbox console exclusives are now a thing of the past.
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