• Xbox’s leadership appeared on a podcast this week to detail its cross-platform plans for exclusives moving forward.
• Four titles in particular have been earmarked for release on rival consoles soon.
• Of the four, only two appear to be certain across multiple reports.

After a week of teasing, Xbox’s leadership appeared in an official podcast this week to discuss the plans the gaming division of Microsoft is working on. In particular they addressed rumours from earlier in the month that selected Xbox exclusives would be making their way to the PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch.

“To ensure long-term success for both Xbox and the industry as a whole, we must continue to evolve. Today we announced that we will expand the communities we reach: we are currently in the process of bringing four Xbox games to other platforms,” Xbox noted in a lengthly blog post.

“These are titles which have been available to Xbox players for at least a year, including hidden gems that deserve to be experienced more widely, and live service games whose communities will benefit from welcoming even more players. We will share more details on these titles soon,” it added.

Along with the news of Xbox exclusives porting, the company confirmed that Diablo IV was coming to Game Pass on 28th March.

As for the exclusives that could be making their way to other consoles, the Xbox leadership was a little more coy, not mentioning any specific options. That said Xbox head Phil Spencer did detail the strategy behind which titles would make the cross-platform journey, with four being earmarked for now.

“A couple of the games are community-driven games, new games, kind of first iterations of a franchise that have reached their full potential, let’s say, on Xbox and PC — there’s always growth, franchises that we obviously want to continue to invest in,” he noted.

“As they’ve [the exclusives] realized their full potential on Xbox and PC, we see an opportunity to utilize the other platforms as a place to just drive more business value out of those games, allowing us to invest in maybe future iterations of those, so equals to those or just other games like that in our portfolio.,” he added.

Depending on whose rumours you read, the four options vary greatly, but two titles in particular appear consistently across international publications. Those two are Hi-Fi Rush and Sea of Thieves, both of which have proved to be hits in recent years, with the latter in particular having a loyal online community.

As such, the prospect of Starfield heading to the PS5 or Nintendo Switch look slim at the moment, and perhaps for good reason given how divisive the game’s release has been between the Xbox and PlayStation communities in particular.

Other titles being bandied about include Gears of War, Halo, Pentinent, and Grounded, but whether any of those hold the lure that 2018’s God of War or Horizon Zero Dawn remains to be seen.

Either way, the four yet-to-be officially disclosed titles are likely going to be the only four that Microsoft ports this year, with it serving as a test for cross-platform for Xbox, Spencer confirmed.

He also said that those playing on rival consoles should not assume that all Xbox exclusives will be ported in the future.

You can watch the full podcast episode below.