Xbox between exclusives, Game Pass, damage control and the role of rumors

The long-awaited podcast about the future X-Box It aired last night, featuring Phil Spencer, Sarah Bond and Matt Botti Exclusively for Game Pass In a clear and obvious attempt to manage an anomalous crisis, it was born mostly on simple grounds Common.

The latter was partly rejected, partly not. Of course, rumors of a fully cross-platform Xbox turned out to be largely unfounded and Spencer immediately clarified that only four games would also arrive on PS5 and/or Nintendo Switch.

CEO of Microsoft Gaming He didn't want to name namesfor now, but he revealed that these are two live services (most likely Sea of ​​Thieves and Grounded) and two games that have already offered everything they have on Xbox (most likely Hi-Fi RUSH and Pentiment).

What Spencer was very clear about was that Neither Starfield nor Indiana Jones will be coming to PS5and together with Sarah Bond and Matt Botti, confirmed the current setup of Game Pass (which has 34 million subscribers: a little?) with the first multiplayer games in the catalog launching on day one

Strange management of the crisis

As we said at the beginning, Xbox's podcast seemed like a strange attempt at crisis management with Spencer, Bond, and Booty doing nothing but repeating things that have already been said over the years, including the fact Make a decision on a case-by-case basis Whether to make the game exclusive or not.

Instead of waiting a week, Microsoft's gaming division leaders decided… It would have been better for them to deny the most important rumors immediatelythose related to Starfield and Indiana Jones, in order to stop the psychological drama that has occurred on social media in recent days.

Finally we get to what all the fuss is about, exactly Rumors and their role. In this case, it seems clear that someone wanted to use this tool to cause damage to Xbox hardware, although as we just explained, the immediate rejection was enough to douse the fire of discontent among the community.

However, we disagree with the premise that we should simply stop spreading mindless news. There is certainly a way to deal with rumours, first to avoid letting the message pass that it is a certain thing; Obviously a certain maturity is also needed on the part of those who read and interpret that information.

Even with all the exceptions in this case, turning off this tap entirely would imply reducing discussion of video games to a mere re-suggestion of publishers' official press releases: wouldn't that be boring? Let's talk about.