The confirmation that Machine Games’ Indiana Jones And The Great Circle is releasing on the PlayStation 5 next spring is one of the bigger stories to come out of Gamescom this week. It’s the latest Xbox studio game to go multiplatform, and the starkest example of the concept of console exclusivity fading into obscurity.
While we’ve heard plenty of noise from Xbox players who are slighted when first-party games are no longer exclusive to their side of the console war, Indiana Jones And The Great Circle feels like a special case. At a time when development costs are high, the stock of the Indiana Jones name is low, and players are less likely to part with their favorite games, making this tentpole release platform-agnostic is an especially wise move for everyone involved.
The biggest obstacle for the upcoming Indiana Jones game is the franchise itself. The last two films in the series were either box office flops or panned by fans and critics alike. It's safe to say that the franchise’s best days, at least on the big screen, are well behind it. But this is also what makes The Great Circle so exciting. This is the moment to prove the character can live on indefinitely through another medium entirely, one not limited by Harrison Ford’s real-life age or the enormous expectations of directors living up to the work of masters like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.
If Disney wants to justify the $4 billion it spent on the iconic character when it purchased LucasFilm, The Great Circle is arguably its best chance to do it. Hindering the potential to reintroduce this character to modern audiences by bowing to the archaic rules of console exclusivity would be a pretty terrible move.
The same can be said about Machine Games. While making a new chapter in the Indiana Jones saga is no doubt a dream opportunity for the talented developers behind Wolfenstein, working on an established property is a notoriously risky gambit in video games. Licensing fees (as well as creative constraints) can burden a project’s success. The 2020 Avengers game (and its pseudo-sequel Guardians Of The Galaxy), for example, reportedly lost publisher Square Enix $200 million despite selling more than 3 million copies. The reason? High licensing fees charged by Disney’s own Marvel Games.
There’s a reason why so many licensed games have become games as a service on mobile. A developer that leverages recognizable intellectual property needs to ensure they’re making a sustainable profit after the license holder takes their cut. Machine Games and Microsoft should jump the opportunity to recoup as much as they can from the cost of making a single-player, microtransaction-free single-player game like The Great Circle.
Microsoft has plenty of evidence that the benefits of putting their games on non-Xbox machines outweigh negative perceptions from fans (at least for now). Sea Of Thieves, an Xbox exclusive since 2018, has sold a million copies on PS5 in four months. Minecraft, arguably Microsoft’s smartest and most profitable acquisition, is a multiplatform juggernaut that continues to grow.
Even Sony, which once resisted the multiplatform future, is coming to terms with this reality. Helldivers 2 became one of the year’s biggest successes by launching on PC on day one, with Concord following suit. They’re shifting gears because even with more than 61 million PS5 owners and counting, not serving other audiences eager to play their games is leaving a substantial amount of money on the table.
The competition’s sizable install base is the final piece of the pie. In today’s landscape, The Great Circle isn’t a certainty. Evidence shows that players at large are less likely to try new games. Exceptions like Baldur’s Gate 3, Helldivers 2, and Black Myth: Wukong prove there’s still appetite for something for new. But these kinds of gargantuan hits are fewer today thanks to games like Call Of Duty, Fortnite and Grand Theft Auto retaining players who are fine playing these titles alone forever.
As a single-player game based on an old property, The Great Circle is already fighting an uphill battle. The fact that it's an unabashed, first-person adventure game with seemingly little interest in appealing to the traditional first-person shooter crowd, makes that hill a little steeper.
None of this reflects the quality of the game, of course, but of the changing taste of what players are looking for. The Great Circle could go on to become a sales juggernaut as an Xbox exclusive. It could be the most successful game of the generation for Microsoft. But when the deck is stacked against old-school single-player games in today’s landscape, abandoning the potential to sell a triple-A game to an additional 61 million customers just doesn’t make sense.
“We run a business,” Xbox boss Phil Spencer said during an interview earlier this week, referencing the changing tides of console exclusivity. “There is a lot of pressure on the industry [...], and now people are looking for ways to grow. For us, as fans and players of games, we just have to anticipate that there is going to be more change in how some of the traditional ways that games were are built and distributed.”
Spencer is right. Indiana Jones And The Great Circle is a game that deserves every opportunity to become a success. It is the next chapter in a beloved character’s story and the next game from one of the industry’s top developers. While the company has its fair share of obstacles to overcome both in terms of hardware sales and a fledgling subscription service, Microsoft is right to remove any risk of getting in the way of its potential success, even if it doesn’t appease a group of superfans still waving a flag in an imaginary console war.
