‘There’s going to be more change’: Phil Spencer speaks on Indy PS5 news

Microsoft’s head of gaming has commented on the decision to bring the previously announced Xbox console exclusive Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to PS5 – six months after he stated it would not be.

On Tuesday, Xbox confirmed MachineGames’ Indiana Jones title will be coming to Sony’s console platform early next year, after its initial release on Xbox and PC this December.

Indiana Jones is the latest first-party Xbox game to be announced for PS5, following four initial multiplatform game announcements in February, and Doom: The Dark Ages in June.

During an Xbox podcast in February, Microsoft’s gaming boss Phil Spencer had specifically ruled out Indiana Jones coming to PS5. Speaking during the company’s latest marketing stream at Gamescom today, he was asked to comment on this week’s announcement.

“Going to the PlayStation announcement, obviously, last spring we launched four games – two of them on the Switch, four of them on PlayStation – and we said we were going to learn,” he said. “I think at the Showcase I might have said that from our learning, we’re going to do more.

“What I see when I look is that our franchises are getting stronger, our Xbox console players this year are as high as they’ve ever been, so I look at it and I say, our player numbers are going up for the console platform, our franchises are as strong as they’ve ever been… and we run a business.”

He added: “It’s definitely true inside of Microsoft that the bar is high for us in terms of the delivery that we have to give back to the company, because we get a level of support from the company that is just amazing in terms of what we’re able to go do.

“So I look at this: how can we make our games as strong as possible, [ensure that] our platform continues to grow both on console, PC and cloud, and I think it’s just going to be a strategy that works for us.”

In concluding, Spencer mentioned the “pressure” facing the games industry, which has seen thousands of job losses over the past 18 months, including many inside Microsoft, and claimed that traditional ways of distributing games would continue to change.

Further reading

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FIRST LOOK: Xbox’s Indiana Jones game is part-Hitman, part-Uncharted, all MachineGames

This looks well equipped to deliver the definitive Indy experience

“The last thing that I’ll say is I think as an industry right now, there’s a lot of pressure on the industry. It’s been growing for a long time and now people are looking for ways to grow,” he said.

“I think for us as fans and players of games, we just have to anticipate there’s going to be more change in how some of the more traditional ways that games were built and distributed – that’s going to change for all of us.

“But the end result needs to be better games that more people can play. If we’re not focused on that, we’re focused on the wrong things.”