During Gamescom this week, Microsoft confirmed rumors and announced that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will come to PlayStation 5 in 2025 following the game’s debut on Xbox/PC this December. In an interview during the Xbox Gamescom livestream, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer explained more about Microsoft’s approach to bringing its own Xbox games to competing platforms.
He said it’s important for people to remember that Xbox is a business, and within Microsoft, Spencer said expectations from CEO Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood are high.
“We run a business. It’s definitely true inside of Microsoft that the bar is high for us in terms of the delivery we have to give back to the company. We get a level of support [from Microsoft] that is just amazing in what we’re able to go do,” Spencer said.
In terms of that support, Microsoft bankrolled the $75.4 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard–this was Microsoft’s largest acquisition by purchase price–by far–in the company’s history.
With that thinking in mind, Spencer said bringing Xbox games to competing platforms is “going to be a strategy that works for us” to achieve that. Spencer also said Xbox games coming to competing systems like PlayStation and Switch is an extension of the changing video game business landscape.
“As an industry right now, there is a lot of pressure on the industry. It’s been growing for a long time, and now people are looking for ways to grow [more]… and for us, as fans and players of games, we just have to anticipate that there is going to be more change in how some of the traditional way that games were are built and distributed,” the executive said. “That’s going to change. 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 focused on that, I think we’re focused on the wrong things.”
Microsoft has so far released a handful of its Xbox games on rival platforms, including Sea of Thieves, Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, and Grounded. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will come next in 2025.
