Only 7% of Xbox Games Launched With Play Anywhere Support in 2024

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Didn’t Lems claim this was a major advantage of Xbox??

As long as Xbox games play on my Xbox that's all I care about.

^ this..

@Antwan3K: I just deleted it because it was not true. I checked and games like COD do not have the feature.

yeah, i'd imagine it's on the way.. it took awhile for some Bethesda games to get in the program after the aquisition..

ultimately, your point stands as stated..

@ghostofgolden: its fucking annoying, but these scam developers love to double and triple dip whenever possible. For me play anywhere is a major feature, but you can't force other developers to use it, and most times they won't simply because they can get away with charging the same people for the same games on different platforms.

It goes along with the same bs practices, ie last gen version of games not being upgradeable to the latest "4k" version lol. Its why console gaming is dieing slowly and more people shifting towards pc, because of bs like this.

Maybe there might be some requirements for Play Anywhere that are difficult for developers to support, or that are unfavorable to them?

No it doesn’t 😂

Currently I have 252 games in my full library with Smart Delivery capabilities, this is part of the Play Anywhere design and almost always encorporates cross system entitlements between XB1, XSX/XSS, and PC, as well as cross system progression like saves and achievements. Of those 252, 122 are owned games, 143 are through Game Pass with 9 being from EA Play (there's some overlap between what I own and what's available on Game Pass), plus 8 from my older Games With Gold pickups.

Most likely reason it isn't more widely supported is for starters the jump to $70 games on 9th gen consoles likely created issues being able to utilize the feature and charge different prices for the different console versions, or to even charge less on PC and expect Xbox Smart Delivery rights on consoles to allow for 9th gen versions being playable. That and possibly it might muddy things with Sony marketing deals to allow the games in their marketing deals to utilize the Play Anywhere feature when Sony systems can't support it. Games on Game Pass will often not always release console and PC versions at same time either, and I don't play enough on PC to know if they treat the cross progression. I think the pricing of games between the different systems to be the main primary culprit.

There might be in some part less support for it due to lack of relevance of 8th gen Xbox console support for more cutting edge games, plus some games still release as 8th gen versions with no 9th gen versions like the recent MVC collection, so if there's no 8th and 9th gen Xbox console versions to utilize the feature between, it won't have a Play Anywhere feature with consoles. Often too some third party games won't release on Microsoft's PC store until later when they release on PC Game Pass, so even though they won't launch with Play Anywhere features due to not having two systems to bridge entitlements or progression, they might add it later... or not, hard to say, I don't play the games I play on consoles when they come to Game Pass on PC to see if progression or ownership rights carries over. I imagine if there's issues though with games that release in the Xbox ecosystem on console and PC at different times, it's probably going to be a factor if there's some lacking Play Anywhere features as well.

@lamprey263: Xbox Play Anywhere is definitely a great, consumer-friendly feature.. cross-buy and cross-progression; i hope it becomes the industry wide standard at some point..

@Antwan3K: I'd hope so too, but like I said I think the real culprit for its lack of adoption is mostly related to pricing between 8th and 9th gen games. If AAA game pricing holds perhaps it could become standard if Sony adopts it, they really didn't plan for the next gen jump between 8th and 9th gen consoles the way MS did, so maybe if they do for the next gen leap then there's hope. But back to generational game pricing being an issue, if with inflation these days being what it is, if games get priced differently between 9th and 10th gen consoles again, perhaps this will again create a barrier to Play Anywhere's wider adoption