It seems the release of Lego Horizon Adventures on Nintendo Switch may be a on-off after all, and not indicative of Sony’s multiformat plans.
It’s not just Xbox’s multiformat plans that seem confusing at the moment, but PlayStation’s as well. While Sony hasn’t highlighted them in the same way, they have been focusing increasingly on the PC in recent months and have made ambiguous statements about multiformat releases in general.
This culminated in the announcement of Lego Horizon Adventures (yet another high profile game that doesn’t have a release date yet) for PlayStation 5, PC, and Nintendo Switch – with the Xbox pointedly left out.
Sony has never elaborated as to why, other than the obvious fact that Lego games sell better on Switch. But it’s now been revealed that Sony Interactive Entertainment will not act as the publisher on Switch and that the reason that version exists at all may have more to do with Lego than Sony.
Rather than Sony, Lego Horizon Adventures on the Switch will be published by obscure Canadian company Solutions 2 GO.
They’re only involved in the Switch version, as if Sony just couldn’t bring itself to deal with a game on a rival format – which may say a lot about their attitude towards multiformat releases.
‘We are incredibly excited to partner with Sony Interactive Entertainment to bring Lego Horizon Adventures to a global audience on the Nintendo Switch family of systems,’ said Solutions 2 GO in a short statement. ‘This partnership underscores our commitment to delivering high quality entertainment experiences to retail consumers around the world.’
Surprisingly, this does have some precedent, as former PlayStation exclusive baseball game MLB The Show is also published on both Switch and Xbox – not by Sony but by the MLB organisation itself. In fact, it’s only at their insistence that the game is multiformat at all, as originally it was a PlayStation exclusive.
It seems likely that a similar exception is being made for Lego Horizon Adventures, since Lego will be aware that most of their audience, in terms of both the game and the toys, are on Switch.
Sony chief financial officer, and former interim PlayStation boss, Hiroki Totoki previously indicated that first party PlayStation 5 games would, in the future be released on both PC and ‘other platforms.’
He never clarified what he meant by that though and the subject has never been brought up again, but it seems increasingly unlikely that he was alluding to any general plans to release games on Xbox or Nintendo formats – even if there is the occasional exception to the rule.
On PlayStation 5 and Switch, former Xbox exclusives such as Pentiment are published by Microsoft themselves, but that’s seemingly something Sony doesn’t want to do when it comes to its multiformat releases.
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