Bethesda’s latest RPG Starfield is a tremendous success and arguably one of the decade’s best games. The game has set new records with concurrent players and is praised for its visually captivating world and exploration among other things. However, Starfield is an Xbox exclusive and is not on PlayStation and technically there is no way it will ever be released on PlayStation unless of course there’s a miracle.
Starfield has been talked about and discussed for years since it was announced and the game not releasing on PlayStation upset some players, especially after its release, crazy right? Xbox Chief Phil Spencer has now opened up on the space RPG’s unavailability on PlayStation and said that it could be seen as a flaw.
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Phil Spencer Addresses Starfield‘s Xbox Exclusive Release
Starfield has been a massive success since its release as part of the early access and became the most-played Xbox-exclusive game with 6 million players during the early access. The game also became the most pre-installed game since the dawn of Xbox Game Pass in 2017. But PlayStation players have been sore about its exclusive release and Phil Spencer has addressed the elephant in the room in an interview with The Washington Post saying that Xbox has walled off its games and that he’s been working on changing that. Spencer said,
“I spent a lot of time thinking about how the game industry is going to grow, and my view is that it grows if there’s less friction of a player anywhere wanting to find their game, and closed platforms create real barriers to that.”
Phil Spencer added that Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard is an attempt to set up open standards in the gaming industry as well as to stay in the competition against rivals such as Sony PlayStation and Nintendo. But these results from Starfield‘s launch are proof that Xbox will be a universal gaming platform with its genius strategy.
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Xbox is Still Not Ready to Expand in Other Spaces
While Nintendo and Sony are moving ahead with expansion in movies and television with their IPs, Xbox is solely focusing on expanding their game services. Sony and Nintendo expanded their IPs with The Last of Us HBO series which earned two dozen Emmy nominations and The Super Mario Bros. movie which earned over a whopping $1.3 billion at the global box office.
When asked about their shift in these spaces, Phil Spencer stated that Xbox is still young to its competitors and “earlier in our journey” to force their way into other spaces. He explained,
“We don’t have the deep expertise that Sony obviously has from their movie studios that make world-class video content, and Nintendo did a great job obviously. I do think it’s important for these worlds we’re creating in games. We used to have a lot of envy in our industry of Hollywood and what they created, then you see comics kind of take over, and now you’re going to see video game stories continue to grow in importance because our creators are as capable as creators of any medium.”
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Spencer stated that they are not yet as capable as Sony is with their film studios but also admitted that it is important for the stories of these games to grow. It is also worth mentioning that a Fallout series is already in the works for Prime Video and only its release will tell how Xbox is willing to continue their transition.
Source: The Washington Post
