Multiplatform game releases have been a major part of Microsoft’s strategy with its Xbox brand in the last several years, and that’s not changing any time soon. In fact, it looks like the company plans to ramp up its multiplatform focus moving forward.
That news comes from a new interview Xbox head and Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer did with Game File’s Stephen Totilo, in which he responded to an inquiry about PC-only game releases potentially becoming a “new norm” for the firm. The question was asked because three of 2024’s nine new Xbox Game Studios releases — Ara: History Untold, Towerborne, and the World of Warcraft expansion The War Within — can only be played on Windows PC right now.
“No. This is historical. There might always be some anomalies, but I look at those three as an anomaly,” Spencer commented. “We want our games playable across as many screens as possible. We think about the Xbox platform as the Xbox console, PC and cloud. We want all the games playable across all of those. We want them to be Play Anywhere.”
“I want the expectation to be that, when we talk about a game, it’s available every place our Xbox user is, including with Play Anywhere,” he said. Play Anywhere is referring to Xbox Play Anywhere, a feature that allows fans to also play purchased Xbox games on PC through the Microsoft Store if they use the same Microsoft account on both platforms.
“I could even pick on us and say it’s not true that, today, every piece of content you buy across all of those runs on all the platforms. I’m speaking to [Diablo’s franchise executive producer] Rod Ferguson specifically about [the Diablo 4 DLC] Vessel of Hatred,” Spencer continued. “But we want to get to the point where, when you buy, whether you’re buying on cloud — which we’re getting ready to introduce — buying on PC and buying on console, you own it across all of the Xbox ecosystem.”
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