REACTION - The announcement of Xbox’s first multiplatform quartet should have happened during the business update
Water waste.
By Jonathan Garrett
21/02/24
As most places had correctly predicted, Grounded, Pentiment, Hi-Fi Rush and Sea of Thieves are the four titles going multiplatform from Xbox Game Studios. They all make sense for a number of reasons; Pentiment and Hi-Fi Rush are smaller, single player titles that will have likely exhausted their broader sales potential. Meanwhile, Grounded and Sea of Thieves will benefit from a massive influx of new players, who can also enjoy the benefit of full cross play support.
Confirmation of updated player numbers for a couple of these games was also nice to see. Sea of Thieves hitting 35 million and Grounded reaching 20 million are strong endorsements of Game Pass as a concept. However, why the needless mystery?! Once again, Xbox are having to be reactive rather than pro-active. Hi-Fi Rush’s PS5 release date leaked. There was a flurry of “insiders” correctly and incorrectly speculating on which titles were “claimed” or “reported” to be going to other boxes.
They should be controlling the messaging, not scrambling to apologise for it or framing it with a vacuous “we hear you” sentiment. They were explicit enough about their intentions for Day 1 releases, backwards compatibility, and cross play / save / progression. Why not this? Consistency of approach is a big problem that Xbox still needs to address.
TARPS?
At the bottom of some of our articles, you’ll see a series of absurd looking images (with equally stupid, in joke laden names). These are the TARP badges, which represent our ‘Totally Accurate Rating Platform’. They allow us to identify specific things, recognise positive or negative aspects of a games design, and generally indulge our consistent silliness with some visual tomfoolery.
