Xbox’s confusing, PlayStation-friendly future
Plus: A translation breakthrough at Roblox and an old Hideo Kojima plea
New hints regarding Microsoft's plans to bring Xbox/PC exclusives to PlayStation (and, to a lesser extent, Switch) are raising questions about the tech giant’s future as a video game console maker.
On Sunday evening, The Verge reported that Microsoft’s marquee 2024 release, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, once multi-console, then renegotiated by Microsoft as an Xbox/PC exclusive, is now being mulled by Microsoft as only a timed exclusive, with a PlayStation release months later.
That’s on top of the discovery of PlayStation and Switch-themed artwork in the code for Tango Gameworks’ Xbox/PC-only Hi-Fi Rush and new rumors about Bethesda’s Xbox/PC Starfield potentially coming to PlayStation.
Microsoft and Bethesda (which handled all three of those projects) haven’t commented. And I can’t corroborate those specific games.
I did report on Jan. 8 that Microsoft’s Xbox/PC exclusive Sea of Thieves was being planned for a PlayStation release. When I was first told about Sea of Thieves last fall, I was advised that other games were also being considered, but hadn’t been able to sufficiently second-source that.
The trickle of reports and rumors has cued some panic among the Xbox faithful.
The worry: If more games from Microsoft’s vast network of studios also show up on Sony and Nintendo platforms, that could diminish the importance of buying an Xbox console and give rivals too much power. Worst case, some fans are fretting, Microsoft could wind up killing its console business.
A $3 trillion company that just spent $69 billion to acquire a massive game publisher is unlikely to exit gaming any time soon. But Xbox is known for bold strategy shifts, some wiser than others.
The future value of owning an Xbox could hinge on how many of Microsoft’s games come to rival consoles and how soon they do after releasing on Xbox and PC. Notably, none of the reporting or rumors has Microsoft releasing marquee games day and date on PlayStation, as it currently does with Xbox games launching simultaneously on PC.
It’s also unclear the role of Game Pass in a (hypothetical?) world where the Starfields and Indiana Joneses show up on PlaySation for $70. It’s possible such a move makes buying into the Xbox platform more attractive, if it sells the idea that players could more affordably obtain those games via a $17/month all-you-can-play Game Pass Ultimate subscription via Xbox, PC or supporting cloud devices.
Four things to chew on
Microsoft isn’t talking now, but let’s look back a bit, shall we?
In late 2020, I interviewed Xbox gaming chief Phil Spencer. Microsoft was fresh off the ZeniMax (Bethesda, id, Tango Gameworks, etc) purchase and the public knew even less about whether that company’s future games would remain multi-platform or go Xbox/PC-only. Spencer seemed to think the Xbox’s network of devices was sufficient to score a hit. No PlayStation needed:
“Is it possible to recoup a $7.5 billion investment if you don’t sell Elder Scrolls VI on the PlayStation?” I asked.
“Yes,” Spencer quickly replied…
“I’m just answering directly the question that you had—when I think about where people are going to be playing and the number of devices that we had, and we have xCloud and PC and Game Pass and our console base, I don’t have to go ship those games on any other platform other than the platforms that we support in order to kind of make the deal work for us.”
Then, in early 2022, as we spoke about his career, I asked Spencer about Microsoft’s bid for Activision and the potential pitfalls of consolidation. Pivoting, his reply turned to his gaming goal for Microsoft:
“I go back to what our vision is of wanting the things that we're able to create—and other creators on our platform create—to reach more people.
“So the thing that I get jazzed about is, I want Starfield to be [lead designer] Todd [Howard]'s most played game ever. I want it to reach more players across more screens, across more geographies.
“And I just believe in the interactive art form of video games as being a way to connect people across so many different divides. And the world where video games get locked behind certain… one business model or one device, I think limits the impact that our medium can have.
“And it's why we invest in the things that we invest in.”
A key way to broaden Microsoft’s reach, Xbox leaders would say at the time, was through expansion of its service via the cloud to phones and maybe Smart TVs. One might have dared envision a future where owning a physical Xbox was as optional as owning a DVD player for those who could be content accessing Xbox as a streaming service.
But, in mid-2023, during a hearing over the FTC’s attempts to block Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard, Xbox executives testified that uptake on the division’s cloud gaming offering on phones was slow, suggesting Microsoft was running into trouble expanding the market for its games.
As the hearings wound down, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took the stand and said, per The Verge, that he wished console exclusives weren’t even a thing:
“If it was up to me I would love to get rid of the entire exclusives on consoles, but that’s not for me to define especially as a low share player in the console market. The dominant player there [Sony] has defined market competition using exclusives, so that’s the world we live in. I have no love for that world.”
Finally, during Microsoft’s tangle with regulators over the Activision deal, it made its case that it would keep Call of Duty as a multi-platform franchise across PC, PlayStation, Xbox and even Nintendo. To reinforce the wisdom of doing this over keeping CoD to its own console, the company produced a chart that described the impact of console-exclusive games shifting the market share between Xbox and PlayStation as “short-lived.”
This chart, which you should expand to really take in, shows Xbox maintaining roughly the same 40% market share in North America against the PlayStation 4 from 2015-2019, despite numerous brief shifts attributed to game exclusives on either side.
Item 2: Roblox to auto-translate chat in 16 languages
Language barriers continue to fall, now in Roblox.
The entertainment company is launching auto-translation technology today for in-app chat that it says will enable Roblox users who speak different languages to understand each other much better.
The company already translates text in its in-app experiences (many of them are games; but not all). The breakthrough here is that it will now use AI and machine learning to do that for rapid text translation of real-time chat.
The idea is that a user can type something in, maybe, Korean in a chat window and it’ll swiftly—in 100 milliseconds or less, Roblox says—switch to English, Russian, Italian or whichever language the other user knows. The two players, typing in different languages, will see a chat that’s entirely in their language, even if more users speaking more languages join in.
At launch, 16 languages are supported: English, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Polish and Vietnamese.
Roblox is using a proprietary large language model that was trained “on available open source data, as well as our own in-experience translation data, human-labeled chat translation results, and common chat sentences and phrases,” company chief technology officer Daniel Sturman wrote in a blog post breaking down the tech. The company also tapped real people to translate slang and trending terms, to help train the AI model.
Roblox plans to give users the ability to report errors and suggest better translations and could add more languages to the mix, Sturman writes. The company would also like to do real-time voice translation, but that “will take some time to achieve.”
Note that Roblox is announcing this AI-based news two days before its latest quarterly earnings report (and we all know how much investors love AI these days).
Also note that this is yet another Roblox tech announcement that emphasizes the company’s potential not as a gaming platform but as a communication company. It’s no wonder that Sturman told me in September that Roblox aims to be “the world's best platform for communication.”
Item 3: In brief..
💰 Palworld publisher Pocket Pair spent more than $470,000 in the past month on server costs to keep the wildly popular game running smoothly online, two of its developers said on X/Twitter.
👀 Genshin Impact developer MiHoYo is the latest video game company to sue people who make software that lets people cheat in their game, largely suing some cheat makers in Canada on copyright grounds, TorrentFreak reports. In recent years, MiHoYo has aimed a lot of its legal firepower on people who leak game info.
⁉️ South Korea’s supreme court cited a man’s habit of playing the battle royale game PUBG as a reason to reject his claims to anti-violence and deny his status as a conscientious objector, the Korea Times repors. The man was sentenced to 18 months in prison for refusing to join the armed forces.
🤔 95% of game developers are working on live service games, Games Industry reports, citing a Griffin Gaming Partners study of 500+ game dev teams. Key caveat: They use “live service” loosely, as GI explains: “The survey defines live services as any regular update cadence planned for a game.”
📚 The rise and fall of Blizzard Entertainment is the subject of Bloomberg reporter (and Game File friend) Jason Schreier’s new book, “Play Nice,” which will be published on Oct. 8.
🎨 A special Pikachu Pokémon card that was initially offered as a purchasing perk at the Van Gogh museum in the Netherlands—drawing mobs, jacking up resale prices and triggering other assorted drama—will soon be sold in select stores in that country, Pokébeach reports (via VGC).
🎂 The Sims turned 24 yesterday. Probably. There’s some confusion about the date, VG24/7 reports.
🎵 Star Wars Jedi: Survivor composers Stephen Barton and Gordy Haab won the Grammy for best video game soundtrack last night, beating out fellow nominees who worked on Stray Gods, Hogwarts Legacy, God of War: Ragnarök and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II.
Flashback: Kojima asks for a Metal Gear break
Nearly 15 years ago, legendary game designer Hideo Kojima told me he would like to make something other than Metal Gear, and he asked for some help.
We were chatting at the 2009 Tokyo Game Show, and he was promoting Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. He was still neck-deep in the action/espionage series and hadn’t been significantly involved in non-Metal Gear games, such as Zone of the Enders and Boktai, in years.
I was working at Kotaku at the time and he was still at Konami. I noted that our readers would love for him to work on other things, too.
"Not only the Kotaku readers but I myself am interested in doing something besides Metal Gear," he said
He added: "If you write that 'Kojima-san doesn't have to make Metal Gear any more' every day on Kotaku, and write to the CEO of Konami and tell him that, then it might be easier for me to make non-Metal Gear games."
So I did, and dozens of Kotaku readers did in the comments as well.
I thought you might enjoy hearing my exchange with him about this. Here’s the clip:
Kojima would go on to direct 2014’s Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and 2015’s MGSV: The Phantom Pain.
He also directed P.T., a free horror game seemingly intended to set up the return of Silent Hill, but an acrimonious split with Konami scuttled that and also ended his time on Metal Gear.
In 2019, newly independent, he and his team released Death Stranding, with a sequel to come out in 2025. He’s also leading development of a game called OD.
After all that? As announced last week, he’ll be leading the development of PHYSINT, a new, original action/espionage game made with Sony’s backing—basically, Kojima-san is ready for that kind of game again.
Extra: My pledge
Last Thursday, I sent free Game File subscribers a note about the partial paywall that starts this week. You can also read it here.
In that note, I laid out a commitment to readers. I’m sharing that here as well, in the effort to be transparent about what you’re all signing up for, whether you’re on on a free or paid sub.
My main focus is reporting (about games, of course). In each edition of the newsletter, I aim to give you a mix of original reporting and a cheat-sheet round-up of what’s happening in gaming.
For decades, I’ve been able to land a who’s who of interviews, something I am working hard to continue at Game File. January was slow for booking them, but I have some good ones lined up for February.
I aim to tell you stories you’re not going to find out about otherwise, to be more than an echo chamber and give you original insights, accounts and data.
I’ll sometimes dig back into my reporting files to bring older, relevant conversations into the present, as I did during Game File’s soft launch.
And, because I play a ton of games, I’m going to tell you about what’s new and worth playing.
I also intend to travel to at least a few gaming events this year, including DICE, Game Developers Conference and the E3-replacement Summer Games Fest. These trips, which are always prime opportunities for reporting, can each cost $1,000 or more for flight and hotels.
I am purely focused on reporting, with zero plans to take any paid junkets from game companies nor do any consulting or other non-journalism work. I expect to do a small amount of freelance reporting, but at least 95% of my work energy will be for Game File.
I just want to announce that I am a commenter now. Excited about this new joint!
Good journalism is worth supporting. Keep it up, Stephen!