‘I’m Not Sure Who It Helps’

Helldivers 2 continues to accelerate, crossing a quarter million players on Steam and many more on PlayStation, but Xbox’s Phil Spencer wonders why it can’t go further.

Microsoft has now committed to bringing some of its “community driven” games to places like PS5 and Xbox soon, the reports being Sea of Thieves and Grounded, and Spencer, in an interview for Stephen Totilo’s Game File newsletter, wondered out loud about why that can’t be true of Helldivers 2.

“I will say, when I look at a game like Helldivers 2, and it’s a great game, kudos to the team shipping on PC and PlayStation, I’m not exactly sure who it helps in the industry by not being on Xbox. If you try to twist yourself to say, like, somehow that benefited somebody somewhere….but I get it. There’s a legacy in console gaming that we’re going to benefit by shipping games and not putting them on other places. We do the same thing.”

In fact, it’s a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to multiplayer games across both consoles. While Microsoft may be bringing Sea of Thieves and Grounded across the aisle, as of yet they haven’t done that with say, Halo Infinite’s multiplayer, among other potential options. Not to say that won’t happen, as the first four games Xbox is bringing elsewhere are likely only the first, but it’s like Phil says, they do it too.

For PlayStation, it’s also a bit all over the place. When Sony acquired Bungie, a stipulation was not only that Destiny 2 would stay multiplatform, but future Bungie games would also be multiplatform. The upcoming shooter Marathon, for instance, will be released on Xbox. But Helldivers 2 isn’t, and Sony has only publicly committed to bringing its new “live” games to PlayStation and PC, not a rival console like Xbox…except for Bungie games. So it’s complicated.

As both Sony and Microsoft move more and more into live games, I would expect to see more of this. Whoever owns the live game they are sharing gets A) a wider player population which can only be good for the game and B) the potential to rake in microtransaction/battle pass cash from players on a rival system. This is what happens with all third party live games right now with multiplatform releases, but Sony and Microsoft still only really have a handful of titles each that qualify here. I think Sony can claim a “win” with Helldivers 2, releasing a big game that Microsoft doesn’t have, so it helps with a narrative, I suppose. But is it better for the game itself? It’s probably tougher to make that case. And that seems to be what Xbox is saying with their game sharing going forward. We’ll see how that works out for them.

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