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Microsoft will not be porting its exclusive first-party titles to other platforms in the future, as stated in an interview with MCV.
Gears 5 is the first game in its series to be released on PC, and once Xbox exclusive Ori and the Blind Forest will release for Nintendo Switch this Friday. In addition, Obsidian Entertainment’s The Outer Worlds is coming to PlayStation 4 as well as Xbox One and PC. Microsoft’s general manager of games marketing, Aaron Greenberg, has said that these are the only exceptions to its independent publishing strategy.
‘Going forward, all of our internal studios, and the new studios we’ve added, will be focused on making games for our platforms and we have no plans to expand our exclusive first-party games to any other consoles,’ he explained. Regarding The Outer Worlds, he said that there was ‘already a commitment’ to port it to other platforms, and that Microsoft will ‘continue to honour that’ as part of its acquisition deal with developer Obsidian.
However, once those commitments are over, the next lot of video games from Xbox’s first-party studios will release only on its platform. ‘Thinking about the next game from Obsidian, InXile or Ninja Theory, all those studios, just like our existing internal studios, whether it’s 343 or Turn 10, they’re going to be focused on making those games for our platforms. So we have no plans to expand any of those exclusive first-party titles to any other consoles,’ Greenberg explicated.
Ori and the Will of the Wisps is confirmed to arrive on Xbox One and PC, and Greenberg clarified why its prequel was ported to Switch. ‘Ori is built by Moon Studios, which is an independent, external studio. They came to us with a desire to bring the original Ori to the Switch,’ he recounted. ‘We thought that made sense, and we’re happy to work with them to enable them to bring that to Switch.’
