Head of Microsoft’s Xbox Phil Spencer unveiled a new strategy the gaming division would undertake that included providing platform exclusive game to other consoles, however, at the time he didn’t reveal the titles being sacrificed in this pilot program. A little less than a week later, Nintendo sheds light on two of the four games it was promised from Microsoft at its Direct Partner Showcase.
According to Nintendo, its gamers will soon be able to play the action-adventure and role-playing games Grounded and Pentiment as soon as February 22, 2024.
The single player role playing game Pentiment will be available for download for Switch consoles starting tomorrow, while Grounded, the first- and third-person co-op survival game won’t hit Nintendo’s Switch platform until April 16,2024. Both Pentiment and Grounded come from Microsoft owned Obsidian studios which may signal how Microsoft plans to handle its porting development roadmap consistency.
During the unveiling of this new exclusive cross-platform publishing strategy, Spencer mentioned that the Xbox team would experiment with four games in total for the 2024 calendar year that would be made available to Nintendo and Sony. At the moment, it’s unclear if Spencer meant that four games per platform would be published from the exclusive Xbox catalog or if it were four titles in total across both consoles which would leave Sony to receive the other two unnamed titles soon.
There were rumors early on that the recent rhythm-based action-adventure game Hi-Fi Rush and open world pirate themed Sea of Thieves could be offerings for their cross-platform publishing run from Xbox.
In lesser reported news from Nintendo Direct Partner Showcase is Microsoft also providing five other games to the platforms Switch Online experience that includes Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll, Battletoads in Battlemaniacs, R.C. Pro-Am, Blast Corps, and the Super Nintendo version of Killer Instinct. The game ports listed above come from Microsoft’s Rare Ltd studios and should be available for play starting today.
