Xbox Team Reveals Plans To Take Four Games To Other Platforms, Sea Of Thieves Rumored To Be One

There have been a lot of rumors about Microsoft’s plans for Xbox lately, ranging from them taking more games multiplatform to them doing away with the Xbox altogether. Xbox boss Phil Spencer told fans a while back that he heard concerns from players who were worried about the fate of the console and that he would have news for us soon. Today was that day with the drop of an official Xbox podcast focusing on the business of Xbox.

The podcast starts out with Spencer discussing the exclusivity of Xbox games. As it turns out, there are plans to take a total of four currently Xbox-exclusive games to other platforms. What four games that might be have not been specified as they want to leave it up to the developers of each to be able to do the announcements. What we do know is that they include two live-service games that will benefit from having more players and two games that Spencer described as never really having been intended to be exclusive but that are projects the team was passionate about and that they wanted to support.

Sea of Thieves fans seem to think Rare is already teasing this move in their recent Valentine's Day tweet, so do some inductry insiders.

Rowboats are red,
And sometimes they're blue,
Other times they're green,
Occasionally they can be white...

Wait, where were we going with this?

— Sea of Thieves (@SeaOfThieves) February 14, 2024

None of this means that anything is happening to the Xbox console. There will still be Xbox-exclusive games and all those games will be day one Game Pass offerings. Game Pass will continue to only be available on Xbox.

Another big announcement that took place during this cast is that in keeping with all Microsoft games being on Game Pass, ABK games will be added too – beginning with Diablo IV on March 28.

The podcast, which is just a bit under half an hour long, goes on to detail the logic behind the current business strategy, the fact that it really doesn’t change much at Xbox, and how multi-platform availability is good for business. They also address how the Xbox team handles community-driven games, how players choose where to play, and how developers go about offering their games to the most people.

When discussing hardware, they also took a moment to discuss game libraries, ownership, and game preservation. This was mostly addressed by discussing things like backward compatibility and cloud saves. The general message, of course, is that the Xbox will continue to exist as its own console, just with more cross-play and general compatibility in mind. In fact, it was said on the podcast that the next Xbox will be "largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation."