There have been some excellent interviews with the likes of the Halo: Campaign Evolved and Gears of War: E-Day teams going live over at GamesRadar this week, and their latest one is with Xbox Game Studios head Craig Duncan.
It's a big interview that goes over a lot of different topics, but one of the most interesting bits for us is how he discusses "day one" releases on PS5 and other platforms. In general, he insists that Xbox wants its games "to reach the most players that we can", but then he's questioned about why certain games are day-and-date for Xbox, PC and PS5, whereas others don't arrive on PlayStation until a fair while later.
Here's a bit of his response:
"There's always development realities about when these projects start – how big a team is, and what plans we have at the start of development. Like you said, when a strategy changes, maybe you've got a plan that exists with a game and maybe you can adopt that, maybe you can't. So that's why. And to be clear, this is totally fair feedback. Sometimes we are inconsistent. You see some games in one place, some games in multiple places. Just know that we're going to work on that, and we're going to try and be more consistent with what we do."
Duncan is then asked about whether he wants to see all Xbox first-party releases landing on other platforms at release in the future, and he explains that "optionality" is still really important and releasing on all platforms at once might not make sense for certain titles — Grounded 2 is one of the examples he gives.
Again, here's more of what he had to say:
"...so that may lead to a bit of optionality. Which is to say, if we're only in a position to release a game on a platform and not have it show up really well? Then I think we wouldn't do that. I think we would have a conversation internally and go, 'Hey, unless we can do it really well and do the right thing by those players, then…' and that's when you get into conversations of, well, maybe we can ship it afterwards.
Because teams are only a set size. We only have a certain amount of… ultimately, it all comes down to resource. Not everything is limitless. So we just want to do the best job, by each platform, by each game. So in that world, sometimes we'll maintain optionality. Some games we might go PC first, others we might go console first. Grounded 2 is a really good example of this, which we launched into Game Preview, Steam, and PC initially. So yeah, I think it won't always be the same."
In other words, it sounds like we'll keep seeing some games launching first on Xbox before going to additional platforms, but there will be more "consistency" in the future in terms of day-and-date releases for certain titles on PS5 and Switch 2.
But when it doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense! That's the case for Forza Horizon 6 right now, which won't be ready for PS5 until later in 2026, but Fable is being primed for a "day one" release on PlayStation as things stand.