Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has received a December 9, 2024 release date for Xbox Series X|S and PC, and more surprisingly has also been confirmed to be releasing on PlayStation 5 next year.
The news came during Gamescom Opening Night Live, along with a new trailer that showcased new snippets of gameplay. While we don’t have a specific date for the PS5 release, we do know that it’ll be coming at some point in the Spring. Spring runs from late March to late June, so we can expect it to release on PlayStation anywhere from 3 – 6 months after its release on Xbox consoles and PC.
This news was rumored in the days leading up to the show, but the rumors go back even further than that, all the way to the start of this year when word was spreading that Xbox would be putting some of their titles on PlayStation consoles and the Nintendo Switch. At the time, Hi-Fi Rush, Sea of Thieves, Grounded, and Pentiment were confirmed to be the only games making the jump, with Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer denying that Indiana Jones and Starfield would be ported to PS5. That denial was only for the first batch of games though. Speaking to IGN after the company’s Xbox Games Showcase this year, Spencer said that other first-party games would be released on rival platforms, but stopped short of confirming which games would be next.
“You are going to see more of our games on more platforms, and we just see that as a benefit to the franchises that we’re building, and we see that from players, and the players love to be able to play.”
With all that mind, it’s not surprising that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will be coming to PlayStation 5 next year. It goes back to what I talked about in June regarding the future of first-party exclusives for both Xbox and PlayStation. We’re slowly moving into an era where first-party exclusives will no longer be exclusive to one console forever. It’s simply not feasible from a financial standpoint as games have become more expensive to make.
Xbox knows this and might be suffering from it the most due to their position in the console market, as well as their Game Pass subscription service cannibalizing game sales. When you have a console that’s trailing behind its competitors, a subscription service that isn’t growing the way you want, and a community that’s been trained to not buy your games, you’ll have no choice but to put your games on other platforms in order to see some sort of profit. If we want to see more games from Xbox at the caliber that we expect from them, or better, then they need to make this move for the health of their business.
It’s a sentiment that I can’t stress enough and I hope that the Xbox community really takes a moment to understand it if they haven’t already. When I recorded my video talking about this, the team at Xbox hadn’t addressed why the decision had been made to release Indiana Jones on PlayStation, but Phil Spencer has now commented on the decision. He talks about how Xbox is a business and how “the bar is high for us in terms of the delivery that we have to give back to the company.” But it’s his later statement that speaks to what I’ve been saying.
“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. And I think us, as fans, as players of games, we just have to anticipate there’s going to be more change in how some of the traditional ways that games were built and distributed, that’s going to change for all of us. But the end result has to be better games that more people can play. If we’re not focused on that, I think we’re focused on the wrong things.”
At the end of the day, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle coming to PlayStation isn’t a bad thing. It’s still going to be exclusive to Xbox for a period of time. If people want to play it on day one and not wait 3-6 months for it to come to PS5, they’ll buy a console, get it on PC, or sub to Game Pass. I would expect to hear more stories like this for future first-party titles from Xbox as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if South of Midnight from Compulsion Games is the next one, as it seems like the perfect title to have this strategy with next. Regardless, this is what has to happen and it’s not a bad thing. It’s just the start of a brand new age for Xbox and the games industry as a whole.
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