Thanks to today The Nintendo Direct focused on third-party gamesnow we know the identity of the two four Xbox titles Microsoft promised to release it on “other consoles”. One of them penitentiary, It’s coming to Nintendo Switch on February 22nd (that’s tomorrow). Another is a multiplayer title GroundedComing to Switch on April 16th.
Penitentiary It debuted on Xbox, PC and Xbox Cloud Gaming in late 2022 and was well received by critics. The RPG has an eye-catching historical art style that matches the story the small team at Obsidian wants to tell. Still, it’s a bit of a niche game, and one that game director Josh Sawyer admits would never have been possible without Game Pass.
“The old mentality of publishers and developers is generally about bigger investments that are higher [return on investment]and that’s not the point in this environment, in this ecosystem,” Sawyer said Waypoint Radio, as mentioned by Eurogamer. “[Game Pass] is the only way I can imagine [Pentiment] to be viable.”
This makes Xbox’s choice particularly interesting Penitentiary as one of the four games it brought to other consoles (it should be noted that the number of Game Pass subscribers it didn’t really grow much in the last few years). Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said earlier this month that all of the titles in question have been on Xbox and PC for at least a year and have reached their “full potential” on those platforms.
Two of the games are community driven (i.e. multiplayer titles) and Grounded is clearly one of them. The Honey, I Shrunk the Children-inspired survival game has been around for several years. It debuted in early access in July 2020 Full release in September 2022.
The other two games going through the big split are “smaller games that were never built as platform exclusives and all the fanfare that goes around that, but are games that our teams really want to build,” Spencer said. Penitentiary more or less falls into that category and has been rumored as one of the games to hit the Switch and/or PlayStation. Here are two other Xbox games expected to come to other consoles Hi-Fi Rush and Sea of Thieves.
