Xbox's Phil Spencer 'Excited' To Bring First Party Game To PlayStation Plus

@themightyant @Kaloudz Timing is very likely indeed coincidental, these deals are not signed overnight and it’s unlikely anyone knew when the deal was signed exactly what they would be discussing in the EU this week.

It’s very unlikely Sony would had agreed to this had they known the timing.

The Xbox boss has taken to Twitter to express his excitement about bringing the Minecraft spinoff to even more players - across different devices and services no less.

Well that's nice of Mr Spencer, I remember Sony's Jim Ryan posting something similar about their excitement in bringing MLB The Show to Gamepass.... Oh wait, hell hasn't been frozen over yet 😅.

Very clearly PR but hey, they already have Minecraft everywhere so...meh?

I want his shirt! And yeah, Sony is really crying wolf with all of this.

Wish Phil was “excited” to bring us Xbox users 1st party games…

@themightyant Microsoft seem to be two steps behind Sony in actually selling consoles though. PSVR2 is a game changer - play GT7 in VR for 30 mins and you will want one. Hard to see how Microsoft will respond to this. More shovelware on GamePass or bug ridden first party content isn’t going to bring new users in.

I'll take a copy of Hi-Fi Rush on PS5 instead. Cheers Phil!

@themightyant Yeah it’s good value if you can’t afford full games but it would be great if they had some AAA games. Making Sony’s life far too easy this generation. Where are the games that are going to bring in new users and define the generation?

@Dufc1985

Yeah it’s good value if you can’t afford full games but it would be great if they had some AAA games.

That must be a typo surely, you think games on Gamepass are not full games 😳?

@themightyant Yeah that’s a good point and I would have loved this when I was a kid. At the moment my time is limited so when I get the chance to play a game I want to know it’s the best possible experience I could be having. HiFi rush does look interesting so I might give it a go.

@Sol4ris Yeah I just mean that the best thing to come out on GamePass over the last 2 years is a 10 hour game. It does look very good but it’s also very short. You can’t complain as you are not directly paying for it but I like a game that really sucks you in to a deep story over a longer period of time.

Being Minecraft this makes sense, they've always been very open about sharing Minecraft.

@themightyant Yeah it’s a great asset to Xbox but I feel they’ve put all their eggs in one basket. If they didn’t have Bethesda then where would their first party content be? I would love them to open their cheque book to set up a new studio to create a ground breaking AAA game that we will still be talking about in 20 years

@Sol4ris PushSquare native here (for obvious reasons), so excuse my generally not commenting over here, but this is as close as you'll get to an official word from PlayStation top brass over MLB The Show coming to multiple consoles: https://blog.playstation.com/2021/02/01/introducing-our-mlb-the-show-21-cover-athlete-fernando-tatis-jr/ (the "excitement" comment is just after the cover photo). Comments are a s***show, so I'd ignore those.

For what it's worth, Jim Ryan doesn't have Twitter, but Hermen Hulst (boss of Worldwide Studios) and Shuhei Yoshida (boss of PlayStation indies) do. I think people spend more time talking about Jim Ryan than they do these two, who have plenty of praise for Xbox. But that's perhaps because this site reports Phil Spencer's every move, while the above two rarely get a mention over on PushSquare.

@themightyant So true!!!!

Phil trolling.. meanwhile, his platform releases such GOTY contenders as Atomic heart directly to GP day 1.

@themightyant 'Even better we can try hundreds of games, risk free' ... We used to get Demos so we could do that for free without paying for a subscription lol

@Sebatrox no he said we can 'try' hundreds of games risk free which is what a demo is

@Moonglow No but if it’s successful it could achieve the 25 million total currently on game pass. Gaming is all about immersion - decades of improvements in graphics and technology has brought that much further. Being in the game and having the sensation of being in a physical world is a game changer. One step closer to achieving my life long dream of getting to use a holo-deck

@Dufc1985 Miss me with that PSVR2. This is 2023 and they're still releasing a headset that requires a cable.

I dunno about you, but I don't sit in VR unless it is a game like Vox Machinae. Even with a neutral pull gantry the cables on my 3 wired headsets are a pain.

I'll stick to playing REAL VR with my PC. 😂

And this is on the base tier of PS+. Microsoft hasn't given anything of this caliber to Gold subscribers in years.

@Moonglow I also like arguing with people that agree with me.

@InterceptorAlpha Yeah state of the art VR technology that pretty much every review says is a great value for money. There will always be a super expensive kit of pc kit that outperforms a console but that is even less likely to go mainstream.

I’d say this was a smart clever PR move by Phil Spencer…timed perfectly to show up Sony as being unreasonable. And used as another demonstration in how ‘transparent’ Xbox is…

Only this is an Xbox ceo who tweets about how much he’s looking forward to PlayStation games after delaying everything on Xbox…
It’s also a ceo who goes on about how he enjoys the ‘transparency’ Xbox have with gamers when Xbox is the only platform that constantly has gamers questioning their own value to them…

So who really knows with Phil. 🤷🏻

You know....I've been a fan of Phils, I really like him, I think he's a great gaming exec...the best of the 3 companies currently, but I'm getting tired of any time he says anything to anyone it suddenly becomes "major Xbox news". I know it's because there isn't any other Xbox news, but it's still obnoxious.

@Dufc1985 VR2 is fantastic, I'll shift time and spend to PS for it personally, for sure, and if MS were to support VR, I'd buy it. BUT, I don't realistically expect its' going to have tremendous pull for the mass market. We're not there yet. Even among us big fans were cautious about how well Sony will support their own VR in terms of first party bigger games because, well....it's Sony, I've seen this movie, I know how it ends. Love, love, love VR2, but you have to jump in knowing you're in it for the indies and enhanced Occulus/Apple ports first and foremost, otherwise it'll be disappointing, and anything bigger is a bonus. OTOH, the indies are doing more interesting things than most of the AAAs have done for a generation, and in VR it all looks superior to 2D AAAs anyway.

@Microbius I think there's a sizable group on Push (or on whatever product is the #1 product) that will hate whatever thing doesn't personally interest them no matter what. I fully believed there was that die-hard crowd that would buy absolutely anything at any price as long as it said Sony on the box. Until PSVR2 launched and you have groups of people that talk about it like it says Xbox on the box It's not all about "I love Sony and hate Xbox" over there, there's a lot of "I like my PS under-TV console and hate everything else!"

FWIW, if you're looking for a non-partial XB-first Jim-hater's opinion, PSVR2 is excellent to me and will have me spending a TON more time (and money) on PS5 than I otherwise would have. Now, I was a PSVR1 fan as well, but also seldom used it as much as I wanted because it was annoying to set up the camera, calibrate every time, then the lenses would fog and smear and were generally blurry, etc.

PSVR2 is absolutely not perfect, and there's always room for future improvements, but it's absolutely a good experience and big leap from 1.

RE the sweet spot, it's true, that there's a certain sweet spot, and some of the periphery can be blurry or whatnot, however, I'd like more improvement there, it's nowhere near as narrow as VR1, I find I generally have a clear view overall, pretty much edge to edge. I think just positioning it on your head right is the biggest thing giving some people trouble. I also think some people are having trouble with eye-tracking/IPD not set up right so the foveated rendering that renders sharpest where your eyes are looking isn't rendering the right spot etc.

It all sounds weirder than it is. You slap it on your head, you take SOME care as to how you place it on your head, no different than safety goggles before cutting metal or something, you calibrate it the first time you use it, and it really should be good.

BUT for first-time VR if you're not sure how you'll react in terms of vr motion sickness and don't want to take the gamble, yeah, you want to try it first. It definitely just doesn't agree with some people. I have a better than average tolerance to it, I can turn off all the handicaps and go full free-motion on anything and it doesn't bother me in the slightest or only feels weirdly disorienting at worst. Not everyone (even among hardcore fans) can go quite so safeties-off like that.

But, I wouldn't put too much stock into the nay-sayers over there. I've read a few posts that have me question if the person in question actually even owns one. I won't say it's perfect, or that there's not aspects I'm already imagining how much better the next gen will be and things I wish were better. But it's a really nice experience right now. Comparing playing Moss in VR1 to VR2 where in VR1 things were really blurry at the edges, the screen door was ever pervasive, and the sweet spot was impossible to stay inside....vs VR2 where I just......play the game....and everything looks right....

i though sony was done with psplus 👀

@NEStalgia I’m thinking that the existence of PSVR2 will drive a lot of people to the PS5 as their first choice off of current gen console. Most of the best games are multi format and people can jump in and out of GamePass on their PC or in near future their tv, phone etc. If you think you might end wanting a PSVR2 or there is potential there for some amazing experiences then people are going to pick a PS5. I think it’s a smart move by Sony as even if the PSVR2 doesn’t massively take off I think it will boost sales of PS5. If people don’t buy a PS5 then they miss a lot of exclusives and access to PSVR2. If people don’t buy an Xbox they can just get GamePass for a month. The future of the industry is about tying gamers into your ecosystem and Sony has all the cards at the moment in terms of that. It’s also worrying that games like Baldurs Gate are already stretching the limits of what the Series S can do and we might find that more games don’t come to Xbox at all as they can’t run on the lower spec console. I would put money on the fact that Xbox will quickly ditch their rules about parity of releases across the console versions. I just can’t see what the strategy of Microsoft is with this generation. It’s kind of just to do more of the same but buy up enough of the market that people put up with that.

@Kaloudz well im sure they realize how much we enjoy reading this stuff so I would imagine they are making dinner plans along with sending d*** pics to each other 😛

@Dufc1985 same way "consoles" are state of the art then they come out.

They're already being outperformed by bleeding edge tech when announced. And outperformed by general tech by the time they release.

PSVR2's main draw is foveated rendering which has been available on general PC headsets for 4 years now. Longer if you include esoteric headsets.

And still despite this, it is cabled. Which is doubly sad when you think about it. The console could handle all the rendering with the headset only needing to run SE sirs and a screen. In even something as dinky as a Quest 2 for factor, you'd be able to easily do 6 hour SOT with a wireless headset. But again, behind the times.

Sony has shown how they support their VR headsets with the first one. That's is to say not very good. Got nearly the Vita treatment which how fast it was abandoned.

@Brue Exaclty ! Feels like there more bothered about games being on everything else apart from Xbox at the moment

And constantly going on about how Xbox can’t compete with PlayStation exclusives etc

@InterceptorAlpha I think you miss the point of consoles. At no point would someone expect this to be the best VR on the market. If someone owns a PS5 and doesn’t have a PC then this is the best value way for them to access VR technology. I am loving how you are responding to comments about the console market with Master Race PC Gamer logic. If it wasn’t cabled it either wouldn’t be as good at the same price point or would be at a much higher price point. I understand you will probably reply with some more PC related facts but for the majority of gamers they prefer other platforms. When you look at games like Elden Ring, Fortnite, Call of Duty, Minecraft etc that all will play best on the latest PC tech - less than a third of people use PC and in some cases much less than that. The comments I have made have been about the choice between console options as that’s one of the most important markets for the industry. Microsoft have spent a lot of money to buy their place into the console market. I feel like since getting burned by Kinnect they have failed to really try anything new. As a console gamer I would love them to bring something new and exciting to the industry. And I don’t count a subscription service as being massively innovative.

@GunValkyrian seems like

@Dufc1985 Realistically I just don't think psvr is going to have any really meaningful effect on console sales. Sure some will buy because of it but not enough to really affect the business outlook on console sales. It's just not influential enough in public mind share, and at the current price, it's really not going to generate that much new interest. Jim's "will that happen someday, we believe that" speech means they know that.

I also think the issues with series a are often overblown. Bg3 isn't exactly hfw. Seems like a classic case of a poorly optimized game relying on brute force well beyond it's visuals needs. But pc is going to be the main market for this game and they're going to have to get us running well on way worse hardware than a series a in their target market. Might be taking them longer, but with or without that console they'd have to do the same process they're doing.

Either way though for Ms they really don't care if people but the consoles or streams on a TV. The delivery mechanism doesn't matter to them and they'd prefer the streamers anyway so that solution really works out still.

Personally I want vr to be so successful ms partners with valve to support index or index 2 went Nintendo to do virtual boy 2. Its not realistic but it's a dream! It's so hard to go back to a flat screen after hours of psvr2 lol

@Microbius Yeah it's one of those things, some people have violent reactions like that. Some feel queasy but can just wean into it until they're totally fine, and some just drive right into the kayak game, paddle at 60mph, and do hairpin turns for 3 hours get up and have dessert...

Demeo, though? There's like no motion in that. That's extreme. And that's a friend you do not take to amusement parks. Or bicycle shops.

I though xbox will bring hi-fi rush or other 1st party games, it's just minecraft

MS has always shipped Minecraft games on almost every platform imaginable. This is something that is turned into news simply because of the situation with Activision-Blizzard.

Tweets with no really news value (nothing surprising, no new game, people complimenting others, etc.) to me are not news. Yes, I am talking about Phil tweets congratulating Sony teams on big game releases. He consistently does that so to me this is not news. Minecraft games shipping on all platforms is expected. Starfield shipping on PS5 would be another story.

I wouldn't brag about this until after Games with Gold is fixed.

If that were the case, Phil Spencer, why Minecraft? You have a franchise that's sat dormant for years you're not making money on. Why not release the original Gears of War trilogy on PlayStation then? You've made all the money you're going to on Xbox with it. I'm not saying release Gears 4 or 5 but, why not make a crap ton of money off s franchise you have that PlayStation fans would love to play. Minecraft is trash. Ya wanna win them over? I'm not saying your bread and butter (Halo or Forza) But Gears of War and Fable. Easy money, Microsoft. Let's see if Phil Spencer is as neutral as he says he is and wants everyone to be buddies, then port Gears of War to let Naughty Dog doing a reboot or remaster