Sony is looking to make its latest PlayStation virtual reality headset more useful by allowing folks to run PC games on it. The company said that it's "currently testing the ability for PS VR2 players to access additional games on PC to offer even more game variety in addition to the PS VR2 titles available through PS5." Sony hopes to roll out PC support for PS VR2 later this year and said to stay tuned for more updates.

Official PC support is something many enthusiasts have been hoping for, since the PS VR2 is, for the most part, a great virtual reality headset. Modders have been working on ways to make the device work with the likes of SteamVR, but official support will make things much easier. 

Despite Sony announcing PC support plans in a blog post detailing some of the titles that are on the way to PS VR2 on PS5, it's hard to argue that the headset has an especially strong library of games as things stand. Sony itself has only released three VR experiences for the platform since it debuted a year ago. In fact, the company has not announced any future first-party games for PS VR2. The lack of backward compatibility with PS VR titles limits the current headset's library too. 

Some notable developers also have cold feet about making PS VR2 versions of their projects. The eponymous studio behind popular VR social space Rec Room says porting the game to PS VR2 would be too expensive.

So, enabling folks to more easily use PS VR2 for virtual reality experiences on PC is a smart idea. They'll be able to tap into a wider selection of games, including big hitters like Half Life: Alyx, on a headset that has excellent dual OLED displays. That could help Sony shift more PS VR2 units. It also gives Sony more of a reason to release Horizon: Call of the Mountain on PC so that the entire Horizon series is available on that platform.

Meanwhile, if Sony enables virtual desktop support, there's the possibility that PS VR2 users will be able to access Xbox Cloud Gaming through a web browser. Wouldn't that be something?

Samsung said Wednesday that the Galaxy S24’s AI features will arrive on last year’s phones (including foldables) and tablets in late March. In January, Engadget’s Sam Rutherford reported that the AI suite would soon be available on the Galaxy S23 series, Z Fold 5, Z Flip 5 and Tab S9. Today’s announcement makes that device list official while adding the more specific arrival window of late March 2024.

That group of 2023 devices will receive a software update next month with the AI features from the S24 series. Those include communication-based AI tricks like Chat Assist (adjusts message tone and translates messages), Live Translate (real-time voice and text translations) and Interpreter (split-screen translation for in-person conversations).

They’ll also get the productivity-based AI features Circle to Search (search for anything on your screen by drawing a ring around it), Note Assist (formatting, summaries and translations of notes), Browsing Assist (summaries of news articles) and Transcript Assist (transcribe and summarize meeting recordings).

Finally, image-based AI features coming to those devices include Generative Edit (reframe shots, move subjects around or delete and replace them), Edit Suggestion (recommended image tweaks), and Instant Slow-Mo (generate extra frames to transform a standard video into a slow-motion one).

Photo by Sam Rutherford / Engadget

The full list of devices receiving the update starting in March includes the Galaxy S23, Galaxy S23+, Galaxy S23 Ultra, Galaxy S23 FE, Galaxy Z Fold 5, Galaxy Z Flip 5 and Galaxy Tab S9. But Samsung says you can expect more devices to join them later. “This is only the beginning of Galaxy AI, as we plan to bring the experience to over 100 million Galaxy users within 2024 and continue to innovate ways to harness the unlimited possibilities of mobile AI,” Samsung President TM Roh wrote in a press release.

We were mostly impressed with the AI features in our Galaxy S24 Ultra review. “While harnessing AI might not be a super exciting development now that everyone and their grandmother is trying to shoehorn it into everything, it does make the S24 Ultra a more powerful and well-rounded handset,” Engadget’s Sam Rutherford wrote in January.

Although he noticed a few hiccups in the AI tools at launch, he found most of them to be a genuinely helpful complement to the phone’s high-end hardware. “Samsung finally has an answer to the sophisticated features that were previously only available from the Pixel family,” he wrote. “Sure, the S24’s tools aren’t quite as polished as Google’s offerings, but they get you 80 to 90 percent of the way there.”

There’s a Borderlands movie coming out, and now we have our very first teaser trailer. This footage gives us a glimpse of all of the major characters, most of which are sourced from the game, and the tone that director Eli Roth is going for.

There’s a definite Guardians of the Galaxy vibe running throughout. Maybe it’s the heavy use of an iconic Electric Light Orchestra song, or maybe it’s the ragtag group of adventurers or the mix of action and humor. In any event, director Eli Roth seems to be channeling his best James Gunn. All things considered, that seems to be the right tone for a Borderlands movie. Color us cautiously optimistic.

Now onto the cast and the characters that franchise fans know and love. Cate Blanchett plays the famously short-tempered Lilith and the actress certainly looks the part. Just look at that hair and outfit. The film follows Blanchett as she looks for a mysterious vault rumored to be stuffed to the brim with sweet, sweet loot. It’s just like the game!

Jamie Lee Curtis plays the scientist Dr. Tannis, an NPC in all three of the mainline Borderlands games. Comedian Kevin Hart portrays the mercenary Roland, a playable soldier in many of the games. Jack Black, following his turn as Bowser in the Super Mario Bros. Movie, plays the robot Claptrap. The well-meaning robot is considered a mascot for the franchise and often acts as comic relief. Black seems well-suited to the role. The cast is rounded out by Ariana Greenblatt as the demolitionist Tiny Tina, star of the spinoff game Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, and Florian Munteanu as her enforcer Krieg.

Of course, it remains to be seen if Roth can pull off this kind of big-budget adventure spectacle. The director’s mostly known for horror films. One thing’s for certain, however, the trailer actually looks and feels like Borderlands. The big and bright color palette recalls the cel-shaded aesthetic from the games. The movie hits theaters on August 9.

We often recommend Logitech gear in our guides and right now, a number of the brand's keyboards, webcams and mice are discounted up to 25 percent. The sale puts the Pebble 2 Combo keyboard and mouse at $50, which is $10 off and matches its all time low. You can get the deal from Amazon or directly from Logitech. The Pebble mouse is the newer model of a recommendation in our guide to productivity mice and the keyboard is the next generation of a callout from our MacBook accessories article. Both Bluetooth accessories are compact, portable and quickly swap between devices with a button press. Plus this new generation is made from around 50 percent recycled plastic. 

Elsewhere in the Logitech sale, the Brio 301 webcam is down to $45, which is a 25 percent discount and matches the low it hit a few times over the past few months. We named it a less-expensive alternative to our overall pick in our guide to webcams. It shoots 1080p video, has a noise cancelling mic and uses auto light correction to make up for a dimly lit room. It doesn't support HDR or have an adjustable field of view, but at just $45, it offers a lot of features at a low price. 

The Signature M650 mouse, which we recommend in our gift guide, is down to $35 (instead of the $40 list price) for a few different configurations, including a left-handed version. Logitech is running the same sale price. The mouse is lightweight, made from recycled materials, and has a SmartWheel that lets you swap between precision and super fast scrolling, depending on what you're working on. And it'll run for two years on a single AA battery.  

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Thanks to today's Nintendo Direct focused on third-party games, we now know the identity of two of the four Xbox titles that Microsoft pledged to release on "the other consoles." One of them is Pentiment, which is coming to Nintendo Switch on February 22 (i.e. tomorrow). The other is multiplayer title Grounded, which will arrive on Switch on April 16.

Pentiment debuted on Xbox, PC and Xbox Cloud Gaming in late 2022, and it was well received by critics. The RPG has an eye-catching historical art style that fits the story a small team at Obsidian wanted 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 focused on larger investments with higher [return on investment], and that's not the point in this environment, in this ecosystem," Sawyer told Waypoint Radio, as noted by Eurogamer. "[Game Pass] is the only way in which I conceive of [Pentiment] being viable."

That makes it particularly intriguing that Xbox picked Pentiment as one of the four games it's bringing to other consoles (it's worth noting that the number of Game Pass subscribers hasn't actually grown much over the last couple of years). Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said earlier this month the titles in question had all been on Xbox and PC for at least a year and that they had reached their "full potential" on those platforms. 

Two of the games are community-driven (i.e. multiplayer titles), and Grounded is clearly one of those. The Honey, I Shrunk The Kids-inspired survival game has been around for a few years. It debuted in early access in July 2020 before its full release in September 2022.

The other two games crossing the great divide are "smaller games that were never really meant to be built as kind of platform exclusives and all the fanfare that goes around that, but games that our teams really wanted to go build," Spencer said. Pentiment more or less falls into that category and had been rumored as one of the games to hit Switch and/or PlayStation. The other two Xbox games expected to come to other consoles are Hi-Fi Rush and Sea of Thieves.

The PlayStation Portal has turned out to be a bit of a surprise hit for Sony. The portable peripheral is often out of stock and hard to come by, even though it does just one thing: stream games from your own PlayStation 5. The device does not run games locally — unless you find a way to modify it to do so.

Two Google engineers claim to have done just that by getting PPSSPP, a PlayStation Portable emulator, to work natively on the Portal. A photo shows Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories running on the system. Andy Nguyen, one of the engineers, says that no hardware modifications were required to make the emulator run and that the project took “more than a month of hard work” to see through.

Nguyen has discovered PS4 and PS5 exploits in the past, as The Verge notes. It’s not yet clear whether Nguyen will detail how to get PPSSPP working or release a jailbreak so that other folks can install the emulator on the Portal with relative ease. “There’s no release planned in the near future, and there’s much more work to be done,” Nguyen wrote on X. However, Nguyen hinted at posting some videos this weekend to show the emulator in action.

The Portal is clearly popular and it’s evident that players yearn to be able to do more with the system. As things stand, they can't even stream games from Sony's cloud gaming service. Perhaps these factors might be enough to convince Sony to give many fans what they truly want: a proper handheld successor to the PSP and the Vita.

Samsung has announced a variety of updates designed to give its devices' audio capabilities a boost, starting with a Galaxy Buds' capability that could make it easier to communicate in another language. The company launched a new feature called Live Translate with its Galaxy S24 series, which people can use as an interpreter for phone calls to, say, a restaurant in a foreign country they're visiting. Soon, Galaxy S24 owners will be able use their phones as a real-time translation tool for in-person conversations if they pair their devices with their updated Galaxy Buds. 

When users listen to the other person through their earbuds, they'll hear the words translated into their own language. Meanwhile, the other person can hear them in their language through the phone speaker. The user can also swap the order of speech during the conversation by tapping on their Galaxy Buds. Samsung says this eliminates the need to pass a phone back and forth when trying to converse in two different languages. When we tested out Live Translate on the Galaxy S24 with a phone call, though, we experienced a noticeable lag before Samsung's computerized system interpreted our words. Still, this could be a valuable tool for travelers visiting foreign countries. 

The company has also revealed that it's expanding Auracast support to its phones and tables, including the Galaxy S24 series. Auracast is a Bluetooth technology that allows users to broadcast audio from devices, such as phones and TVs, to an unlimited number of nearby headphones, speakers and earbuds. Samsung initially made the technology available for its smart TVs only. With this Galaxy Buds update, owners will be able to use Auracast to transmit audio from their mobile devices to multiple earbuds. 

In addition, Galaxy Buds2 Pro and Buds2 users will be able to enjoy 360 Audio if they pair their earbuds with certain Samsung Neo QLED, QLED and OLED TV models. By doing so, their earbuds will be able to track their head movements for an immersive watching or listening experience. Finally, Galaxy Buds2 Pro users will be able to use Samsung's Auto Switch feature to automatically switch their connection between the company's tablets, Galaxy Books and TVs and its phones if they need to take a phone call. These features are making their way to Galaxy Buds2 Pro, Buds2 and Buds FE users starting in late February. 

The next Nintendo Direct is scheduled for this Wednesday, the company just announced. It's being billed as a "partner showcase," with Nintendo saying it'll show off Switch games coming in the first half of this year from "our publishing and development partners." It'll kick off on February 21, bright and early at 9AM ET. 

While Nintendo holds these showcases on a regular basis, this one is potentially more significant than usual. Last week, Microsoft made an expected but still surprising announcement that it would begin bringing some of its titles to "other consoles," a phrase that's hard not to interpret as games coming to the Switch (and Sony's PlayStation 5 as well). 

Nintendo says it'll be a 25-minute presentation, so there's a chance we'll hear about some games from other developers, as well. But we're all expecting to see some news about what games Microsoft is going to bring over to the Switch. Microsoft only said that it would be bringing four games to other platforms but didn't name them; the latest rumors cite Hi-Fi Rush, Sea of Thieves, Halo and Gears of War as likely options to make the move.

This comes at a time when Nintendo doesn't have a lot of its own first-party games scheduled for the platform (that we know of, anyway). There's also the looming specter of a Switch 2 console; reports just said that the hardware is getting pushed back to 2025 after an expected launch at some point this year.

After letting rival camera companies catch up for the last few years, Sony laid down a gauntlet with the 24.6-megapixel A9 III. It’s the world’s first mirrorless camera with a global shutter, a much-awaited holy grail feature. It completely eliminates rolling shutter distortion found on CMOS cameras by reading the entire sensor at once. It also boosts speed and removes the need for a mechanical shutter.

As a pioneering product, it’s not cheap at $6,000, but you can expect the technology to come down in price in the future. And there is a downside: Image quality is reduced compared to regular cameras, due to the nature of a global shutter.

Is it worth trading off image quality for extra speed and lack of distortion, especially compared to stacked sensor cameras that are already pretty quick? To find out, me and my pro photographer friends put a final production model through a variety of shooting scenarios.

Body and handling

The A9 III is Sony’s best handling-camera yet, borrowing all the latest features of recent models like the A7R V. It’s very light for a full-frame camera at just 617 grams. And the redesigned grip is more comfortable and secure, which is a big help to working pros, especially with heavy lenses. By comparison, Sony's A1 can be hard on one’s hands over a full day, according to my photographer pals.

There are three top control dials, making it easy to find primary settings in fully manual mode. It has a pair of dual dials, with one for video, photos and S&Q plus shooting modes, and the other controlling burst along with autofocus. You also get a rear joystick, control dial and no less than 5 custom buttons.

With everything well-placed, it’s a cinch to shoot manually. When you do need to delve into the menus, those are also well laid out. Settings are divided logically into categories, while the home menu shows key options (shutter speed, white balance, etc.) at a glance. Everything can be customized, and you can back up your settings to a memory card.

The high-resolution two million dot rear display is of course touch sensitive for focus and menu control. It flips out and tilts up or down to please both photographers and creators. The viewfinder is the best on any camera, with 9.44 million dots at 120Hz, or half that at 240Hz. That level of sharpness makes it easy to check focus and colors. Again, this is Sony flexing its tech muscles as the primary camera EVF supplier.

Battery life is a solid 500 shots, but you can double that with a new $400 vertical grip, which also gives you a better hold of the camera. It has a dual-card slot setup with both SD UHS II and CFexpress. As usual with Sony, the latter is the slower Type A variety, though. Those are less than half the speed of CFexpress type A, but their smaller size allows Sony to do the dual slot setup.

Other key features include headphone and mic ports, with the option to add Sony brand microphones or audio accessories to the hotshoe. There’s also a full-sized HDMI port, USB-C charging port, ethernet, live-streaming capability and more.

Performance

With the global shutter, dual Bionz processors and the same dedicated AI processor found on the A7R V,, Sony’s A9 III is the fastest full-frame camera in the world. Compressed RAW bursts can be shot at an incredible 120 fps with autofocus and auto-exposure, or you can dial that down to 60 fps or 30 fps.

Steve Dent for Engadget

A big caveat is that the 120 fps mode only works with supported Sony lenses, while third-party lenses are all limited to 15 fps. Hopefully the company will address that in a future firmware update.

The buffer holds 200 RAW frames, so it fills up in less than two seconds at maximum speed. It takes longer to clear the buffer than it should due to the CFexpress Type A cards. If you use SD UHS II cards instead, it takes about twice as long to clear.

In any case, shooting at 120 fps is major overkill most of the time unless you like wading through thousands of photos later on. Sony does have a solution, though. You can shoot at, say, a still-very-fast 30 fps, then press the C5 button to enable the top speed at key moments. That way, you’ll get the shot you want without wasting frames.

The A9 III is also the first Sony camera to use a pre-capture mode that saves a second of photos when you half-press the shutter button. After you fully press it, those photos are saved along with any taken after.

Nathanael Charpentier

Your photos will usually be sharp, too. The 759 phase-detect focus points allow for extremely rapid and accurate autofocus in most situations. For regular continuous AF, it can keep up with even the fastest action.

The AI-powered subject detection shines too. Face tracking works with subjects farther away and it follows someone tenaciously, even when they duck behind obstacles. Human tracking is fast and fluid, and you can easily see if it’s locked onto eyes, face or body.

It can detect birds, animals (or both), along with insects, cars and trains. You can also select any distinctive object and the system will usually track it reliably.

The bottom line is that it rarely misses focus, so it’s great for professional sports, wildlife, weddings and more. Of course it’s not infallible and can mix up subjects, but is better than any camera I’ve tried to date.

Nathanael Charpentier

The A9 III has no need for a mechanical shutter because there’s no rolling shutter distortion, meaning you can shoot in complete silence at all times. With that, it’s perfect for sports like golf, as you can shoot a player in mid-swing without disturbing them, and a club in motion won’t be distorted.

It also allows for extremely fast shutter speeds up to 1/80,000th and it can sync with supported flashes all the way up to that speed. It also eliminates the flicker and banding from venue lights, another big aid for sports photographers.

Sony has also improved its in-body stabilization significantly, boosting it to 8 stops with supported lenses. That allows shots down to a quarter second or less, matching Canon’s EOS R3 and besting the Nikon Z9 and Sony’s own A1.

Image quality

As mentioned, the primary issue with this camera is image quality. So is how much does it fall below regular CMOS cameras? To test that, I shot in situations including gymnasiums, night scenes, bird shooting, an airport and more.

There’s no question that dynamic range is reduced compared to Sony cameras like the A1, at least by a stop. The reason is that the sensor has less light capacity due to the space taken up by the extra electronics.

It also has a smaller ISO range, both on the high and low end. Minimum ISO is not great at 250 and at the high end, ISO is limited to 25,600, half that of the A9 II.

In general, there’s more noise and less dynamic range at any given ISO setting than the A9 II. At the same time, the resolution is lower than rivals like the Nikon Z9 and Sony’s own A7R V and A1. So for landscapes, portraits and other types of photography where dynamic range and resolution is important (and speed isn’t), the A9 III isn’t the best choice.

That said, you’d need to pixel peep to notice any major difference in image quality between rival 24-megapixel cameras up to about ISO 6400. For the intended audience of sports, action and wildlife shooters, it’s more than sufficient.

Beyond that, images are noisier, but still usable up to the maximum ISO 25,600 with noise reduction (Sony appears to have more aggressive noise reduction for JPEG images at higher ISOs). I had no difficulty extracting good shots in dark scenes at ISO 6400 or even ISO 12,800. And as mentioned, you have more control with a flash than any other camera on the market – so that’s a solid option in low light.

Otherwise, images are typical for Sony, with accurate colors and skin tones. The 14-bit RAW files are easy to work with and allow some pushing and pulling, particularly in highlights.

Video

Steve Dent for Engadget

Sony took advantage of the global shutter to make the A9 III its most capable mirrorless camera for video. 4K at up to 60 fps is supersampled using the full 6K sensor width, while 4K at 120 fps can also be shot using the full sensor, albeit with pixel binning. That mode supports full 120 fps playback as well, or slower playback modes via the slow and quick (S&Q) setting.

RAW 4K capture at 60 fps is also possible using an external recorder. All of those modes are available with 10-bit S-Log 3 recording to expand dynamic range in challenging lighting conditions.

That’s just the start of the A9 III’s video powers. Autofocus is as fast and accurate in video as stills mode and has all the same AI features. That means you’ll be sure to keep even fast-moving subjects sharp, whether they’re people, birds, animals or vehicles.

Those who prefer to shoot manually can employ Sony’s handy focus map feature. It has the auto-framing seen on previous Sony models like the ZV-E1 that lets YouTubers move around while filming themselves. You also get the digital zoom feature that reduces focus breathing for supported lenses, with some loss of quality.

Steve Dent

Airplane propeller distortion in video is a telltale sign of a rolling shutter camera, so naturally we had to test the A9 III at an airport against Sony’s stacked sensor A1. Our findings? While the A1 still produces bendy propellers, they’re of course dead straight on the A9 III. That trivial test has large implications. You can shoot things like whip pans or a fast moving train that you’d never try with a rolling shutter sensor. And since everything is exposed at once like a film camera, it’s more cinematic.

The A9 III does have some video competition, as RED just launched a pair of full-frame global shutter cinema cameras last month.

It has the same excellent video stabilization capabilities as the ZV-E1. Regular optical stabilization is good for handheld shots without much movement, or you can kick in the dynamic active mode for walking. That provides near gimbal levels of smoothness, though there’s a considerable zoom and loss of sharpness.

Much as with photos, video quality isn’t quite up to other full-frame cameras, with more noise in general. I shot in S-Log3 most of the time to maximize dynamic range and was satisfied with the results. In low light, I was forced to use some noise reduction.

Quality is still better than any APS-C mirrorless or cinema camera. I think the global shutter advantages, particularly the elimination of rolling shutter, will be worth the tradeoff in quality for a large number of videographers.

Wrap-up

Steve Dent for Engadget

Sony launched its first full-frame mirrorless camera, the A7, years before rivals, and was first to market with backside illuminated and stacked sensors. Lately though, rivals (especially Canon) have been catching up and the field has leveled. With the first global shutter camera, Sony has taken a leap ahead once again.

Image quality has held global sensor cameras back, but Sony clearly felt that the time was finally right. It was a wise calculation — the A9 III is far better than I expected for a first-gen product. It offers mind-blowing speeds and incredible video capabilities, with a relatively small cost in image quality..

Its primary rivals are the $4,800 Canon R3, Sony’s own $6,500 A1, the $5,650 Nikon Z9 and $3,800 Z8, all stacked sensor cameras. The latter three offer much higher resolution and better picture quality, plus shooting speeds that are still darn fast. They all have some rolling shutter, though, along with flicker and flash sync issues that don’t exist on the A9 III.

Whether it’s worth risking that kind of money on new and unproven stacked sensor tech depends on the buyer. Action photographers and videographers won’t blink at the cost if they advantages of global shutter will help them make money. Unless you really need those benefits, though, Nikon’s Z9 and Z8, along with Sony’s A1, are more versatile cameras — and the Z8 is significantly cheaper.

After listening to yesterday’s Xbox Podcast, where the company announced it was bringing four older titles to non-Xbox consoles, a question popped into my head: Why does Microsoft, a software and services company, need a console business?

The same question was asked when The Rock announced the original Xbox console in 2001, but the industry has changed a lot in 23 years, and it’s worth asking again. Microsoft, after initially struggling to make an impact with the Xbox, firmly established itself as a top player with the Xbox 360, before settling for second place with the Xbox One and currently finding itself in a distant third with the Xbox Series consoles.

As much as the industry has changed, no company in it has changed more than Microsoft. It is now a mega-publisher of games, with over 30 in-house studios. Many of these development teams are world-renowned, with a rich, multi-platform history. It’s also the operator of one of the largest game subscription services in the world, Game Pass. Microsoft’s plan has been clear for all to see: Sell a console and upsell a subscription service filled with games produced at cost by in-house studios.

There’s just one problem: It doesn’t have the audience.

Blizzard Entertainment

The pandemic years saw rapid growth of Game Pass, which rose from 10 million subscribers in April 2020 to 25 million in January 2022. Since then, it’s added just 9 million subscribers, with the current total standing at 34 million. Any thoughts that Game Pass could emulate Netflix’s decade of growth are long-gone, but there’s a crucial difference between the two services: Netflix doesn’t try to sell its customers $400 boxes to watch Netflix.

Microsoft has struggled with the duality of its gaming strategy: A subscription service requires a constant churn of content to feel worthwhile, but a console requires “system sellers” that attract people to buy it over the competition. Those are very different things, with wildly different budgets and timelines. Game Pass, no matter how attractive, is not a system seller by itself.

While Microsoft has balanced its dual goals of Game Pass growth and console sales, its competitors have stolen its audience. Nintendo and Sony are laser-focused on exclusive experiences for their customers, which they both see as key to selling consoles. Microsoft has once again found its hardware outsold 2:1 by Sony, and the Switch has likely outsold the Xbox One and Xbox Series consoles combined. While Sony is increasingly understanding the power of the PC market, and Nintendo is still maintaining at least a couple of its money-spinning mobile games, there is little chance of either company’s overall console strategy changing.

Microsoft

Microsoft’s pledge to bring four unnamed titles to “other consoles,” then, is intriguing. I subscribe to Game Pass, but I’m not sure I would’ve paid $30 for Hi-Fi Rush or $40 for Grounded, no matter how much I enjoy either of those games. From the way Xbox chief Phil Spencer described the company's cross-platform quartet, there seems a reasonable chance that those games, together with Pentiment and Sea of Thieves, are the subject of this experiment:

“We looked at games that are over a year old … A couple of the games are community-driven games, new games, kind of first iterations of a franchise that have reached their full potential, let's say, on Xbox and PC … Two of the other games are smaller games that were never really meant to be built as kind of platform exclusives and all the fanfare that goes around that, but games that our teams really wanted to go build that we love supporting creative endeavors across our studios regardless of size.”

Porting these four titles to other platforms is not going to do much to change Microsoft’s fortunes. Yes, I’m pleased that more people will get a chance to play Hi-Fi Rush and Pentiment, and I’m sure Microsoft will make some money from Switch and PlayStation owners. But from Microsoft’s perspective, why give your potential audience four fewer reasons to buy an Xbox?

Cloud streaming, and the ability to turn any screen into an Xbox, is clearly the long-term plan for Microsoft. There has been some progress in getting its app on more platforms, but few TVs or streaming boxes support Microsoft’s Game Pass app for cloud streaming, and Xbox Cloud still isn’t close enough to local play to be a viable option for many games. More expensive options like GeForce Now show some promise, but it’s clear that cloud gaming is not going to be a viable primary gaming platform for the masses for many years.

8BitDo

In the meantime, what does Microsoft do? We’re likely approaching the midway point of this console generation, and its current systems have a comparatively tiny audience. Game Pass subscriptions are slowing, and there isn’t a viable way for PlayStation or Switch players who don’t own a gaming PC to play Xbox games. It’s a lot like the Xbox One generation, except Microsoft now owns roughly $76 billion more game studios. In this landscape, it’s easy to understand the rumors of top-tier Xbox games being released on other consoles after a brief exclusivity window.

The economics of making big games for small audiences are tough. 2024 looks set to be a better year for Microsoft, with first-party titles like Hellblade II, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Avowed on the way. But even combined, it seems unlikely that these titles will grow Xbox sales or Game Pass subscriptions significantly. Few gamers are willing to commit to a second console, let alone a third.

As a third-tier player in the console market, there’s really no easy road to success. To release AAA titles on PlayStation would increase the sales of Microsoft games massively, but it could also erase the point of owning an Xbox. Microsoft could probably afford to go multiplatform while maintaining a console business if it had some true AAA franchises to hold back, but despite spending $69 billion on Activision Blizzard, it agreed to not make its new-found system seller, Call of Duty, exclusive to Xbox until 2034. Halo and Forza are not enough in 2024.

So… maybe it’s time for Microsoft to stop making consoles, and just focus on becoming the biggest company in gaming. I’d almost suggest that was the plan, were it not for Phil Spencer confirming future hardware was on the way. It’s obviously not viable to abandon this console generation, but it’s definitely viable to begin planning for a graceful exit from hardware by developing for rival platforms.

If Microsoft believes in the transition to cloud gaming, it should not be planning to release a next-generation console. Why keep losing a console war you believe is about to end? Stepping back from its competition with Sony and focusing on making the best games for the largest audience would put the Xbox division in the strongest position to capitalize on the post-console future. Publishers like Ubisoft and EA already sell subscriptions on the PlayStation store, and Microsoft could, too — a subscription with every Call of Duty and Bethesda game would probably go down well with PlayStation gamers.

While Microsoft waits for cloud gaming to become viable for the billions of active players around the world, the best place for its games, and Game Pass, might be PlayStation, Switch and PC.

Jessica Conditt contributed to this report.