Indiana Jones Game Is An Xbox Exclusive
Bethesda has confirmed its upcoming Indiana Jones game will only be playable on Xbox.
The Federal Trade Commission vs. Xbox court hearing, in which FTC is trying to block Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, has revealed that the upcoming Indiana Jones game, announced in 2021, is an Xbox exclusive. Pete Hines, senior VP of global marketing and communications at Bethesda, has also confirmed that the game was initially supposed to be a multiplatform release.
According to Kotaku, while answering questions in court, Hines revealed that Disney, more specifically Lucasfilm, had an agreement with Bethesda for a multiplatform triple-A Indiana Jones game. However, two months after the game was announced, Microsoft officially completed its acquisition of ZeniMax Media, Bethesda’s parent company.
Following the acquisition, the agreement with Disney was amended to transition the game to Xbox Game Pass exclusive—including both the Xbox home console and the PC gaming platform.
As for the reason why the upcoming Indiana Jones game was turned into an Xbox exclusive after it was initially set to launch on PlayStation as well, Hines attributed it to “reducing risk and trying to get a degree of clarity.”
According to him, Lucasfilm, as a licensor, is giving a ton of feedback on what Bethesda is making, which ends up adding a ton of stuff for developers to address. Subsequently, this adds more stuff to an already packed schedule, which only increases the workload within a specified time period for release.
Of course, excluding some home gaming and handheld consoles from the release schedule is a good way for a game development company to give itself additional time to work on the feedback provided by the licensor.
This basically means that Bethesda has plenty of creative control over what happens with the upcoming Starfield—which was almost a PlayStation 5 exclusive—but not over the Indiana Jones game, which is owned and licensed by Lucasfilm, with the latter having plenty of say in the title development.
Exclusivity isn’t necessarily a bad thing; Microsoft could still opt to release the Indiana Jones game as a timed exclusive for the Xbox platform and then port the game to the PlayStation—if Sony decides to play nice.
Of course, this is mere speculation on our part; the current state between the competitors is tense due to the Microsoft × Activision Blizzard King acquisition, with Sony being very vocal against the deal. The FTC, which is supposed to evaluate whether the acquisition constitutes a monopoly, is trying to paint the narrative that Xbox’s exclusivity is anti-competitive behavior.
That’s a really weird argument to make since Sony has been forcing exclusivity for its own platform for years now and has purposefully withheld certain titles from the Xbox console by region-locking them or simply releasing them in Japan only.
This already constitutes anti-competitive behavior by Sony, as it damaged Xbox sales in Sony’s home country—which approved the Microsoft × Activision Blizzard King acquisition, by the way. And now, the FTC is basically siding with Sony and using the Indiana Jones game exclusivity as an argument against the deal.
As for the Indiana Jones game itself, the details about the previously announced game remain scarce. The fact that the game is developed by MachineGames—credited with the new Wolfenstein games—and Bethesda is public knowledge. It’s scheduled to release as a completely new Indiana Jones story, though, judging by the trailer, it seems that the narrative is set during the original trilogy’s timeframe.
