Microsoft still hasn’t said anything official but supposedly the head of Xbox has confirmed they’re not giving up making Xbox consoles.
It’s now over a month since rumours emerged that Xbox is planning to make at least some Xbox exclusives multiformat, and despite the mere idea turning the internet upside down Microsoft still hasn’t made any kind of public comment on the issue.
Xbox boss Phil Spencer has promised a ‘business update event’ sometime this week, but hasn’t said exactly when. What he has done though, according to an inside source, is assure Xbox employees that Microsoft is not exiting the hardware business.
Unfortunately, the report is extremely brief, but it claims that Spencer stated that, ’Xboxes would continue to be part of a strategy that involves multiple kinds of devices.’
Spencer was apparently talking at an internal ‘townhall’ meeting on Tuesday, but the only person to have reported it happened is Inverse journalist Shannon Liao.
Strangely, it was only mentioned in passing in a newsletter, with no indication of what else Spencer might have said – including the all-important topic of multiformat games.
Xbox giving up consoles always did seem unlikely and multiple other sources have already claimed they still have new hardware plans, potentially including a next generation launch in 2026.
However, according to Nick Baker from XboxEra, the new console will be designed by the Surface team, as Jason Ronald, the lead developer of the Xbox Series X and S console, has been replaced.
Whatever Phil Spencer may or may not have said on Tuesday wouldn’t necessarily still be valid now, as the one thing every source seems to agree on is that there’s intense disagreement within Microsoft on what direction to take and that’s one reason why there hasn’t been any official word yet.
A number of sources made comments over the weekend, with Windows Central’s Jez Corden suggesting that the business update has been planned since last summer but is being fast-tracked in light of the leaks. However, Corden deleted the tweet suggesting as much and implied he would not be posting again on Twitter for the foreseeable future.
Rumourmonger Tom Henderson, who has previously not been part of the furore, suggested that existing first party exclusives would not be coming to PlayStation 5 (so no Starfield) but that all future ones would (so potentially Fable). Although, he too later deleted his tweet, replacing it with the message ‘all things are being considered/discussed’.
To add to that, Nate The Hate, who was the first to break the original rumours about multiformat games, now claims that he was mistaken and that Starfield is not coming to PlayStation 5, despite several other sources suggesting otherwise.
However, he also states that he still believes that other games, beyond just Hi-Fi Rush and Sea Of Thieves, are going multiformat, which sounds like he may have heard the same thing as Tom Henderson.
That’s something The Verge’s Tom Warren has also agreed with, stating that there is at least one other major title coming to PlayStation that has not yet been mentioned.
The whole situation is, as you may have noticed, a complete mess, with multiple, usually reliable, sources constantly switching their stories, apparently in reaction to Microsoft’s own changing plans.
Nothing is certain at the moment but the closest thing to a consensus is that Hi-Fi Rush and Sea Of Thieves, and perhaps other Xbox exclusives, are going multiformat, and that Microsoft is not giving up making games hardware.
The longer Microsoft waits before saying something public the more confusing the whole situation is going to get, but as of right now there’s still not even a timetable for them to explain themselves.
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