Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer announced this week that Xbox will start allowing its games to be accessed on different consoles, four months after Microsoft successfully bought Activision Blizzard in October 2023, per The Associated Press.

Xbox games are known to only be available on Xbox consoles and Game Pass for PC. But now it seems other gaming consoles are getting the opportunity to have Xbox games.

What exactly did Xbox announce?

Xbox’s official podcast released a new episode on its Youtube channel (as of Feb. 16, it was ranked No. 9 on Trending), where they announced the update to release four games to other consoles.

According to Reuters, Xbox has not specified which games they are going to release, but the games they’re planning on releasing to other consoles have already been available to Xbox players for at least a year.

Why does this announcement matter to the gaming community?

This is a move that goes against a common strategy in the gaming business, per AP, saying that, “Makers of gaming hardware often license popular video games in hopes of getting consumers to buy the devices that hold their exclusive rights.”

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Spencer did an interview with The Verge and shared Xbox’s thoughts on this change: “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.

“Our goal would be that the communities of those games grow, they grow and they thrive, but we’ll see. We’ll see what happens when we take games that launched originally on Xbox and PC and bring them over to other consoles, other closed platforms.”

But it’s not just Xbox that is considering this move. According to an article from the BBC, PlayStation is hoping to publish more of its games on other platforms as well.

This gives Xbox the opportunity to create bigger fanbases and get rid of the gatekeepers that prevented some users from enjoying Xbox games. Right now, Xbox has only shared that two of the games to be released are community-based, while the other two are smaller titles, per CNBC.

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