Microsoft have made it abundantly clear that going forward, they’re no longer going to stick to traditional console generations. They are instead going for a cross-generation approach that sees them building an ecosystem across devices rather than focusing on one piece of hardware, with both Xbox One and Xbox Series X (alongside PC and cloud streaming) being equally active members of that group.
Xbox boss Phil Spencer has, in fact, said in the past that at least for the foreseeable future, they won’t be making any generation-exclusive games for the Xbox Series X, with their releases all being cross-gen, and in a recent update posted on the Xbox website, he re-iterated that, saying that no one will be “forced into the next generation”, and that for the next couple of years, all games coming from Xbox Game Studios will be cross-gen releases.
“We want every Xbox player to play all the new games from Xbox Game Studios,” Spencer wrote. “That’s why Xbox Game Studios titles we release in the next couple of years—like Halo Infinite—will be available and play great on Xbox Series X and Xbox One. We won’t force you to upgrade to Xbox Series X at launch to play Xbox exclusives.”
So far, there’s much we don’t know about Microsoft’s lineup of upcoming first party releases, so we don’t know which of their titles are going to fall within this cros-gen window and which ones will be focused entirely on the Xbox Series X. We will, however, know more soon enough, with the Xbox Games Showcase scheduled for July 23.
Sony’s position with the PS5 has been significantly different, and they’ve emphasized multiple times that they still strongly believe in console generations, and plan on bolstering the PS5 with a steady stream of exclusive content. Both approaches have their strengths, so it should be interesting to see how well Microsoft and Sony can execute on their different strategies.
