Xbox Planning to Release the ‘Majority’ of Its Exclusives on PS5

Xbox will apparently release the “majority” of its tentpole first-party titles on PS5 in the future, as its multiformat strategy gathers pace. Earlier in the year, the Redmond firm broadcast a strategic business meeting, where it announced four console exclusive titles – including Hi-Fi Rush and Sea of Thieves – would launch on Sony’s format. While it stopped short of confirming other rumoured releases, it insinuated this was simply the start of a new philosophy for the firm.

And according to GamesIndustry.biz’s well-connected Christopher Dring, there’s much more to come: “From what I understand the majority of [Xbox’s first-party games] will be coming [to PS5] at some point, assuming it progresses as Xbox believes it probably will,” he said on a podcast. “I think Xbox is in real trouble as a hardware manufacturer, and that was the thing that came out of GDC for me.”

In the wake of flatlining hardware sales in Europe, Dring explained that some publishers are pondering whether to even continue supporting the Xbox console. “You can follow our monthly coverage in the games market and you can see that Xbox sales are falling, and it’s been falling all throughout last year and it’s falling even harder this year,” he noted. “The phrase one major company who released a big game last year said [was], ‘I don’t know why we bothered supporting it.’”

Dring quoted other high-level executives who noted a lot of work goes into creating multiple versions of Xbox games, so they scale across both the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S hardware profiles. He explained: “You’ve got third-party publishers going, ‘We’re putting in a lot of effort trying to create a Series S version and an X version of a game when, to be honest with you, for us the market is PC and PS5.’”

Obviously, we’ll need to wait and see what the official word is from Microsoft, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see more Xbox titles announced for PS5 following this initial batch. There were rumours, prior to the aforementioned strategic business broadcast, that Starfield and Gears of War are in development for Sony’s device, so we’ll need to await more information in the coming months.