Summary
It’s been a pretty turbulent start to the year for the video game industry, and in particular, Xbox. Just a few weeks into 2024, a big rumor hit the internet claiming that Xbox was about to port some of its first-party exclusives to the Nintendo Switch, includingSea of ThievesandHi-Fi Rush. This opened the floodgates for an unprecedented number of follow-up rumors, along with some pretty loud, and oftentimes far-fetched speculation, a lot of which revolved aroundXbox Game Pass.
How Xbox’s New Approach to Exclusivity Could Affect Xbox Game Pass
Xbox Game Pass Will Continue to Receive Exclusives on Day One
During the 23-minute episode of theOfficial Xbox Podcast, Phil Spencer, Sarah Bond, and Matt Booty openly discussed the company’s upcoming plans to bring four first-party exclusives over to other platforms, and Xbox Game Pass was mentioned consistently throughout the discussion. Matt Booty, the President of Gaming Content and First-Party Studios at Xbox, expressly stated that Xbox Game Pass is going to remain exclusive to Xbox consoles, refuting the rumors that Game Pass could be coming to Nintendo Switch, something that’s been speculated on for years now.
Directly following that statement, Booty explicitly said that Xbox Game Pass will continue to receive first-party Xbox games on their release date. During the podcast, the panel directly referred to games such asIndiana Jones and the Great CircleandSenua’s Saga: Hellblade 2as examples of the day-one support that Xbox Game Pass will continue to receive in the future. For these first-party games, nothing is going to change at all right now—based on this podcast, it doesn’t seem like it’ll be changing anytime soon, either.
Xbox also used this special podcast episode as an opportunity to announce that Xbox is going to start rolling out some Activision Blizzard games for Xbox Game Pass soon, beginning withDiablo 4on March 28. It’s currently unclear when otherActivision Blizzard gameswill join the service, but the panel mentioned that this was only the beginning of the rollout. It’s also a little unclear if Activision Blizzard games will be day-one Game Pass titles moving forward, with the panel not specifically confirming or denying that.
Xbox’s Multi-Platform Experiments Seem Like They Could Only Be a Good Thing for Game Pass
Right now, onlyfour Xbox exclusivesare heading over to other platforms, and during this podcast episode, Xbox was refreshingly open about how much of an experiment this all actually is. Phil Spencer and the rest of the podcast panel made it very clear that this is not necessarily the start of a new Xbox release strategy, but simply a testing of the waters. If this strategy works out well for the yet-unannounced four titles, then it seems likely that Xbox will continue to experiment with it in the future, but the company is taking everything one step at a time.
Xbox Game Pass Ultimate
Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is the highest tier of Microsoft’s flagship game subscription service that offers over 100 game titles that you can play with a single purchase, making it one of the most outstanding value propositions of the Xbox ecosystem to date.
