Xbox boss Phil Spencer has addressed the surprise revelation that first-party exclusive Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will release on PS5 in spring/Q2 2025 just a few months after its Xbox debut, stating Xbox is “a business”, and that “the bar is high in terms of the delivery we have to give back” to parent company Microsoft.
In an in-house interview with Xbox On, Spencer was not directly challenged about the decision to release Indiana Jones on PS5 so soon after its December Xbox debut, only insisted that, at that time, Xbox was “gonna learn” and “watch”, and “from our learning, we’re gonna do more”.
At that time, Spencer explicitly said that neither Starfield nor Indiana Jones and the Great Circle were one of the four games tipped to come to PS5, and whilst that’s true – Indiana Jones was not one of the four games mentioned; it’s actually the fifth – some fans have taken issue with Spencer’s framing of the issue.
“Obviously, last spring we launched four games, two of them on the Switch, four of them on PlayStation, and we said we were gonna learn,” Spencer said. “We said we’d watch. I think at Showcase, I might have said, from our learning, we’re gonna do more.
“What I see when I look is: our franchises are getting stronger. Our Xbox console players are as high this year as they’ve ever been. I look at it, and I say, okay: our player numbers are going up for the console platform. Our franchises are as strong as they’ve ever been. And we run a business.
“It’s definitely true inside of Microsoft, the bar is high for us in terms of the delivery we have to give back to the company, ’cause we get a level of support from the company that’s just amazing, what we’re able to go do,” he added.
“So I look at this, how can we make our games as strong as possible? Our platform continues to grow both on console, on PC, and on Cloud, and I think it’s just going to be a strategy that works for us.
“The last thing I’ll probably say is that I think there’s a lot of pressure on the industry. It’s been growing for a long time, and now people are looking for ways to grow.
“I think us – as fans, as players of games – we just have to anticipate there’s going be more change, and how some of the traditional ways that games are built and distributed – that’s gonna change. That’s gonna change for all of us. But the end result has to be better games that more people can play. If we’re not focused on that, I think we’re focused on the wrong things. So for us at Xbox – health of Xbox, health of our platform, and our growing games are the most important things.”
Reports that Microsoft was preparing to release a number of first-party games on competing consoles first surfaced at the start of this year, but it wasn’t until claims that high-profile exclusives such as Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle would also be going multiplatform that Microsoft broke its silence.