Four Xbox games coming to the Switch and the PS5 starting today

Just a few short days after officially confirming its intentions to bring a number of Xbox games to Sony and Nintendo systems for the first time, Microsoft announced the four titles making the multiplatform jump first. They are the very same games that were heavily rumored to kickstart the company’s gradual but seemingly inevitable transition to third-party publisher since the beginning of the year: Hi-Fi Rush, Sea of Thieves, Grounded and Pentiment, two of which will be available for the Switch while all four will be available for the PS5 and the PS4. By releasing PS4, PS5 and Switch versions of these titles Microsoft is practically targeting more than three times the number of consumers all four games were initially developed for.

The owners of Nintendo or Sony systems that are interested in those titles won’t have to wait long either: Pentiment is launching on the Nintendo Switch – as well as the PS4 and the PS5 – today, February 22nd, while Hi-Fi Rush will be available for the PS5 on March 19th. Grounded will be available on all three formats on April 16th, while Sea of Thieves will be available for the PS5 on April 30th. Both Grounded and Sea of Thieves also offer cross play functionality between all the different formats they’ll be available for – an important feature that will surely help the online communities built around those games grow quite a bit faster now.

In the press release announcing the PlayStation and Switch versions of these four games Microsoft predictably made sure to remind everyone that “the biggest games in the world will be on Xbox” (whatever that means), that “the company’s first-party games will all come to Game Pass on day one” (was that ever not a given?) and that “the company has laid a robust and innovative multi-year hardware roadmap” (since we already know there are more Xbox models coming).

Microsoft was also keen to mention that “players can look forward to Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, Avowed, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and more on Xbox Series X|S, PC, Xbox Cloud Gaming and Xbox Game Pass this year”, implying that those will remain exclusive to its own systems and services… for now.

Still, it feels like this relatively low-key announcement is the beginning of a much bigger change in Microsoft’s strategy for the video games market. The head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, may be calling these new versions of older Xbox games for PlayStation and Nintendo systems “an experiment”, but it’s clear to all that – in the long term – nothing is off the table when it comes to Microsoft Game Studios multiplatform releases.

The way Microsoft will choose to make the transition to one of the largest third-party publishers in the world still matters a lot, but it’s happening. It will be quite interesting to see how well these four new ports of Xbox titles look and play on the PS4/PS5 or the Switch, as well as what the owners of those systems will actually think of Microsoft’s games. All 300 million of them.