Phil Spencer has officially confirmed that four Xbox games will be coming to other platforms but has not said which titles or which platforms.

The news comes from the Xbox Podcast released today. The first topic is tackling exclusivity, and Phil doesn’t waste much time before confirming that four games will be going multiplatform. However, he didn’t say which titles would be making the jump.

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“I’m not going to name those games. The teams that are building those have announce plans that are not too far away. As we know, game teams put a lot of energy into their announcements with the partners, so I don’t want to take anything away from those teams.”

Phil did, however, confirm that the four games are not Indiana Jones or Starfield.

Current rumours indicate that at least three of the games are likely to be Hi-Fi Rush, Sea of Thieves and Pentiment. The Verge also has published a report suggesting the 4th game will be Grounded.

Spencer also mentions that two of the games are “community-driven” and “service” based titles, which would certainly fit Sea of Thieves and Grounded.

The other two games he refers to as being, “smaller games that were never really meant to be built as kind of platform exclusives and all the fanfare that goes around that, but games that our teams really wanted to go build.”

“And as they’ve realised their full potential on Xbox and PC, we see an opportunity to utilize the other platforms as a place to just drive more business value out of those games, allowing us to invest in maybe future iterations of those, so sequels to those or just other games like that in out portfolio.”

While Phil never specifically states what the “other” platforms he keeps referring to are, it seems safe to assume he means PlayStation and Switch

The podcast goes on to address future games and the idea of exclusivity.

“I have a fundamental belief that over the next five to 10 years, exclusive games – games that are exclusive to one piece of hardware – are going to be a smaller and smaller piece of the games industry,” Spencer said.

However, Spencer was also quick to add that it’s just these four games coming to other platforms

“We’ve made the decision that we’re going to take four games to the other consoles,” Spencer says. “Just four games, not a change to our fundamental exclusivity strategy.”

“Four games, no promise beyond that. If you’re on those other platforms and see these games coming, please don’t take it as some signal that everything’s coming – it’s not.”

In a follow-up interview with the Verge, we get a slightly better view of what Spencer is actually planning. When asked if they will do more games in the future if these four are successful, Spencer says,” Yeah, but we haven’t seen that yet. We’re obviously one of the biggest publishers on PlayStation and Nintendo today, when you think about the Activision Blizzard and Bethesda lineup of games. So we know what it means to ship games on Steam, PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox.

These are games that originally launched on Xbox. They were Xbox-branded games and we want to see what happens, because going and doing the development work to bring them to new platforms is real work. We want to make sure that the return makes sense. We want to make sure the audience that’s there has an appetite — maybe they don’t”

It’s deliberately vague wording in both the podcast and the interview which seems to amount to this: if these four games do well, expect to see more Xbox games on PlayStation and Switch.

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