Over the last couple of years, Microsoft has become increasingly more open with their first party input. Not only has the company published all of their Xbox exclusives to PC, they’ve gone past the Windows Store and are starting to release on Steam. More surprisingly, they’ve allowed a few games on rival competitor’s hardware. Well, it seems they want to pull back a tad as the company said there’s no future plans to do more of that.
In a statement to GamesIndustry, Microsoft said that they had no plans to extend more IPs to other consoles. They say they will continue to pursue crossplay and other similar types of cross-console services, but that will seemingly be the end of it.
“The past year has been an exciting time for us as we have more than doubled the internal creative teams making up Xbox Game Studios,” The company stated. “As these new studios transitioned in, we were aware of some existing commitments to other platforms and will honor them. However, going forward these new studios will focus on making games for our platforms. We have no plans to further expand our exclusive first party games to other consoles. We continue to believe deeply in cross play and progression of games with the right flexibility for developers to insure a fair and fun experience.”
This comes directly after Ori and the Blind Forest was announced for the Switch, meaning it will seemingly be the last first party Microsoft title on another console for a good while. It’s both logical but also a little surprising consider their evolving openness, but they still have a brand to continue after all.
