But since closing the Activision deal last fall, Xbox has made a series of moves that have left fans and analysts baffled about its overall strategy. It has laid off thousands of staff, shuttered studios and been unable to articulate a consistent message about how it plans to release games. Xbox fans assumed those big acquisitions would lead to more exclusive games that helped justify their console purchase, but the opposite has happened.
Early this year, Microsoft began putting some of its former exclusives on PlayStation, starting with smaller, older titles such as Hi-Fi Rush. This week, the company announced that another big, new title will follow the same route. Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, coming in December to Xbox and PC, will arrive on PlayStation in the spring of 2025.
Ditching console exclusives is good news for players who can only afford to stick to one piece of hardware. And Microsoft was able to squeeze the Activision deal past regulatory scrutiny in part because it promised to continue releasing Call of Duty on PlayStation. But Xbox’s release strategy has been so confusing, it requires a massive spreadsheet and a full-time job to keep track of it all.
It’s not that confusing. The Activision deal almost didn’t happen following all of the scrutiny Microsoft received from their earlier buying of Bethesda and making all of their new games Xbox exclusives. They squeaked by and sealed the deal in the end, but presumably they don’t want Activision to be their last acquisition ever. To that end, they’re third-partying some of their high-profile-but-probably-not-big-earner games so that when some regulatory agency tries to make that same argument for their next big purchase, they can point at the few titles they published on other consoles as proof that they promise not to be anticompetitive.