Four Xbox games are coming to PS5 and Nintendo Switch soon

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Microsoft’s Phil Spencer finally spoke about plans for Xbox Series X|S games on PS5 and Switch, though the division head stopped short of actually naming them in the Xbox podcast. Spencer said four Xbox games will launch on “the other consoles” and that the teams behind those games will announce them when the time is right.

Bethesda’s Starfield and the upcoming Indiana Jones game are not among the four.

Current speculation is that these announcements will happen during Nintendo’s February Direct, rumored to be one of the Big N’s partner showcases.

Spencer echoed his and head of Xbox Studios Matt Booty’s comments from 2023 about the platform’s future as the rationale behind these decisions.

“This is not a change to our fundamental strategy,” Spencer said. “We make every decision with the long-term health of Xbox in mind, and Xbox’s long-term health means a growing platform, games performing, and reaching as many players as we can.”

Spencer said two of the games are “community-driven service games” that found dedicated audiences in the Xbox ecosystem and have potential to grow even larger on other platforms. Obsidian’s survival game Grounded and Rare’s Sea of Thieves are the popular picks for what these two are.

The other two are games that Spencer said were never intended as exclusives. They were games that Xbox’s studios wanted to make, he said, and growing their audiences on other platforms means that Xbox has greater flexibility to invest in sequels or similar passion projects in the future. Leaks already pointed to Hi-Fi Rush from Tango Gameworks and Pentiment from Obsidian as two likely candidates, and both certainly fall under the categories Spencer outlined.

Spencer also said Xbox will continue implementing this strategy in the future, as console exclusives become a “smaller and smaller” part of the games industry. Xbox will only consider games at least one year old that have reached what the company believes is their full potential on Xbox platforms, but Spencer also said this is a learning process for the team and the approach may change.