Microsoft will bring four Xbox games to other companies' consoles

Microsoft said on Thursday that it will release four of its video games on competing consoles.

Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft's gaming division, said in a company video that the decision is "not a change to our kind of fundamental exclusive strategy."

Nevertheless, the shift signals a willingness to generate more revenue from content that previously could only be played on Microsoft's own gaming hardware.

Microsoft completed the acquisition of prominent video game publisher Activision Blizzard for over $75 billion in October. In the fiscal second quarter, 11% of revenue flowing into Microsoft, the world's most valuable public company, was tied to gaming. The Game Pass service that provides access to multiple games now has 34 million subscribers, up from 25 million two years ago, the company said. But the Xbox Series X and Series S consoles, which became available in 2020, have not proven as popular as the Sony PlayStation 5 or the Nintendo Switch.

"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," Spencer said in the video.

Microsoft declined to identify the titles in question, but Spencer said they won't be Starfield, a long-awaited game that came out in September, or the forthcoming Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

Spencer did say two of the four are "community-driven games," while the other two are smaller titles that weren't meant to be exclusive to Microsoft's own systems.

The Verge reported last week that Microsoft was looking into releasing the Indiana Jones game, previously announced for Xbox and Windows, on Sony's PlayStation 5 in addition to Microsoft's own console and PC operating system. The title