Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to the official Xbox Podcast. I’m your host, Tina Amini, and we have a very special episode today, as you can probably tell by the fact that I’m joined by Phil, Sarah, and Matt. Welcome.
Speaker 2: So we made the decision that we’re going to take four games to the other consoles, just four games, not a change to our kind of fundamental exclusive strategy. It is we’re making these decisions for some specific reasons. We make every decision really with the long-term [00:00:30] health of Xbox in mind and long-term Health of Xbox means a growing platform, our games performing, building the best platform for creators, reaching as many players as we can. We’re always looking to learn as a leadership team and to grow. And we think this is an interesting point in time for us to use what some of the other platforms have right now to help grow our franchises. So we’re going to do that.
Speaker 1: So these four titles, what are they? Can you say,
Speaker 2: I’m not going to name [00:01:00] those games. The teams that are building those games have announced 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. So I won’t be talking about the titles specifically, but I think when they come out, it’ll make sense.
Speaker 1: Can we say if either of those titles are Starfield or Indiana Jones,
Speaker 2: They are not Starfield or Indiana Jones? We looked at games that are over [00:01:30] a year old, so they’ve been on Xbox and PC for a while. A couple of the games are community driven games, new games, that kind of first iterations of a franchise that have reached their full potential, let’s say on Xbox and pc. There’s always growth franchises that we obviously want to continue to invest in. Part of having the ability to continue to invest is that the businesses behind those franchises continue. We think it’s important that these service-based games that have communities behind them, [00:02:00] that they can have confidence that they’re going to exist in the future. So two of them kind of community-driven games that will end up on other platforms and give us the ability to continue to invest in them. We think that’s great for the business and great for the communities, more players to play with.
Speaker 2: I’d say two of the other games are 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 that we love supporting creative endeavors across our studios [00:02:30] regardless of size. And as they’ve realized 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 our portfolio.
Speaker 3: All of our games are always in Game Pass, and so I’m excited to announce with the coming together that we had Activision Blizzard King, [00:03:00] that Activision and Blizzard games are coming to Game Pass, starting with Diablo four on March 28th, which I’m super, super excited to share today. And it’s all part of our commitment to make Xbox, the Xbox experience and the games that we build is widely available as possible. So now the 34 million Game Pass members can all enjoy the fantastic experience of Diablo for, and we got more to come. There’s some exciting stuff coming out in hardware that we’re going to share this holiday. And we’re also invested in the next [00:03:30] generation roadmap. And what we’re really focused on there is delivering the largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation, which makes it better for players and better for creators and the visions that they’re building.
Speaker 4: This 2024, the year coming up, we’ve got more than 10 major releases coming up. Great stuff. Hellblade two, we’ve got Diablo expansion, we’ve got a vowed aura, the Indiana Jones game, and there’s more in development, which I think we’re going to be [00:04:00] able to share more about at our June showcase coming up pretty soon.
Speaker 1: Well, I guess I should get ready to work on that show. Well, thank you all for showing up on the podcast today, and we’ll see the rest of you this June. Yeah, thanks, Gina. Thank you.
