XBOX
What does Xbox’s multiformat future mean for consoles?
What does ‘Xbox’ actually mean, in 2024? The name suggests a physical object, of course, but recent events suggest Microsoft is paying about as much attention to the increasingly dusty black cuboid under our TV as we have been of late. Not that it seems to have an alternative definition prepared – its business-update broadcast in February had the feel of a meeting called to try to answer this very question, Phil Spencer and co offering a variety of possible options. The most striking one, ultimately? “One of the largest publishers on PlayStation [and] on Nintendo Switch.”
It’s a counter-intuitive way of describing a current platform holder, even if the underpinning facts are well known. Many of the studios and publishers Microsoft has rolled up over the years were midway through projects, and thus presumably committed to other platforms: Double Fine’s Psychonauts 2, InXile’s Wasteland 3, Bethesda’s Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo, not to mention its ongoing support for ESO and Fallout 76. More to the point, it owns Minecraft and now Call Of Duty, two of the biggest series in videogames. Indeed, we have to wonder if the developments that triggered February’s broadcast are a knock-on result of the Activision-Blizzard acquisition, and the assurances regarding COD’s future on other platforms that had to be made to get the deal through regulators. (Indeed, an interview with the Sea Of Thieves team suggests that these plans were first put in place at the beginning of 2023, in the midst of Microsoft’s antitrust hearings in the US, UK and EU.)
In that light, the announcement itself emerged as something of an anticlimax, certainly by comparison to the rumours that had circled in advance, and the rending of garments (and hardware) that followed, at the idea of Xbox giving away the crown jewels. None of those big-ticket series reared their heads, in the event, and the reports of Starfield and Indiana Jones And The Great Circle making the leap came to nothing – for now, anyway. Instead, the lineup consisted of Pentiment, Hi-Fi Rush, Grounded and Sea Of Thieves, a grab bag of titles with no obvious connection except that they have, per Spencer himself, “reached their full potential”, their headlining days well behind them.
It’s a little easier to see this as a show of faith with the two service games of the lineup. Sea Of Thieves executive producer Joe Neate presents it as “an opportunity, six years in, to go to all these new players”, continuing what creative director Mike Chapman tells us has been continued growth of its playerbase “every single year”. Chapman argues that it’s a logical fit for the “shared-world” game, which expanded to Steam back in 2020. Only time will tell, though, whether Sea Of Thieves manages any kind of sizeable expansion on PS5, and Neate
