It’s now confirmed that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will be coming to PS5 in spring 2025, not long after it was initially released as a timed exclusive later this year. This was set in stone – after numerous reports and rumors – during yesterday’s Gamescom Opening Night Live, and now Xbox boss Phil Spencer has said something about what went into the decision to bring the game to Sony’s consoles.
Obviously this is all part of Xbox’s ongoing plans to do more cross-platform things, as detailed in this podcast earlier this year, with Grounded, Sea of Thieves, Hi-Fi Rush and Pentiment all brought to new platforms so far.
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During one of Microsoft’s Gamescom 2024 livestreams, Spencer was asked about the whole Jones on PS5 thing. The executive acknowledged that those four games described above made the jump because Xbox is “learning something,” and said he’s seen Xbox’s “franchises get stronger” and “the number of Xbox console players this year is higher than ever.”
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He then alluded to the pressure Microsoft is putting on Xbox — the company has already laid off employees and closed studios this year — to deliver strong results following its major acquisition of Activision Blizzard last year. “We run a business,” he said. “It’s definitely true that the bar is high at Microsoft in terms of the performance we have to give back to the company, because we get a level of support from the company that is just incredible and what we can do.”
“So the way I look at it is: How can we make our games as strong as possible? Our platform continues to grow, on consoles, on PCs and in the cloud. I think it’s just going to be a strategy that works for us.”
Spencer then added: “The last thing I’ll probably say is that there’s a lot of pressure on it as an industry right now. It’s been growing for a long time and now people are looking for ways to evolve. We as fans, as players of games, just have to expect that there will be more changes in the way some of the traditional ways games have been developed and distributed will change. That will change for all of us, but the end result has to be better games that more people can play. If we don’t focus on that, I think we’re focusing on the wrong things.”
He concluded by noting that in Xbox’s case, the “most important things” are its own health, the health of the platform and “growing games.”
What do you think about Indy coming to PS5 soon after release, especially if you own an Xbox? Let us know below!
