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Microsoft confirmed this week that its tentpole, triple-A exclusive title, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, would in fact be a timed-exclusive on Xbox. The action-adventure title will arrive first on Xbox Series S/X, Game Pass and PC in December, before making its way to PlayStation 5 early next year, Bethesda announced at Gamescom on Tuesday. Following the confirmation, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer has spoken about the company’s intent and future direction when it comes to first-party games releasing on rival platforms.
Appearing on the Xbox On YouTube channel alongside Xbox president Sarah Bond, Spencer took on a question about Indiana Jones and the Great Circle launching on PS5 and said that Xbox was focussed on growing its games.
“Going to the PlayStation announcement, obviously, last spring, we launched four games — two of them on the Switch, four of them on PlayStation — and we said we were going to learn,” Spencer said. “We said we’d watch, I think at the showcase I might have said from our learning, we’re going to do more,” he added, referring to Microsoft’s announcement from earlier this year about launching four of its exclusive games on PlayStation and Nintendo Switch.
While Spencer did not directly connect the decision to launch Xbox games on a rival platform to business reasons, the Xbox chief said that the gaming division had to run a business and be accountable to its parent, Microsoft.
“What I see when I look is that our franchises are getting stronger, our Xbox console players are as high this year as they’ve ever been. So, I look at it and I say, ‘okay, our player numbers are going up for the console platform, our franchises are as strong as they’ve ever been… and we run a business,’” Spencer said.
“It’s definitely true inside of Microsoft — the bar is high for us in terms of the delivery that we have to give back to the company, because we get a level of support from the company that’s just amazing in what we’re able to go do.
“So, I look at this: how can we make our games as strong as possible, our platform continues to grow both on console, on PC and on cloud, and I think it’s just going to be a strategy that works for us,” Spencer said.
The Xbox chief did not expand on the decision to bring a major first-party release like Indiana Jones to PS5, nor did he clarify if more big exclusive Xbox games would cross over to other platforms in the future. But industry insiders believe more first-party Microsoft titles are likely to go multi-platform. Another Bethesda title, Doom: The Dark Ages, announced at Xbox Games Showcase in June, is confirmed to launch on PS5 alongside Xbox Series S/X and PC.
Spencer, however, did admit to a “pressure” on the video games industry as a whole and talked about the stagnating growth of the sector, indicating “more change” was on its way.
“The last thing that I’ll probably say is I think as an industry right now, there’s a lot of pressure on the industry. It’s been growing for a long time and now people are looking for ways to grow,” he said. “And I think for us as fans and players of games, we just have to anticipate there’s going to be more change in how some of the traditional ways that games were built and distributed — that’s going to change for all of us.
“But the end result has to be better games that more people can play. If we’re not focussed on that, I think we’re focussed on the wrong things,” Spencer said.
He concluded by saying that the health of Xbox and its games remained the “most important” thing for the company.
Developed by MachineGames and published by Bethesda, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is set for launch on PC, Xbox Series S/X and Game Pass on December 9. The action-adventure title will arrive on PS5 in Spring 2025. After Bethesda confirmed Tuesday that the game would launch on PlayStation, game director Jerk Gustafsson said: “We want everybody to be able to enjoy this adventure.”