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Indeed, I wrote thatthe “This is an Xbox” campaign was premature.
What do Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Monster Hunter Wilds, and Civilization 7 have in common?
Xbox Play Anywhere lets people buy once, and play across Xbox consoles and Windows PCs with the same save file. However, it’s a relatively small amount of games actively supporting the feature.
What do they all have in common?
A complete lack of support for Xbox Play Anywhere.
The problem is, Xbox’s vision for this functionality is pretty much exactly that:a vision.
The biggest AAA games don’t seem to believe in Xbox Play Anywhere.
The best way to discover Xbox Play Anywhere games is, perhaps hilariously, via this fan-madespreadsheet.
Some games have cross-buy and cross-save, but some only have cross-save and not cross-buy.
Most of course, have neither.
Being able to access my Xbox games anywhere is awesome. It’s just that 95% of what I actually want to play isn’t available.
Crucially, the biggest and best games of the year organically shun Xbox Play Anywhere for whatever reason.
Civilization 6 is on the Xbox Store for PC, but not Civ 7.
But why didn’t Capcom come back for Monster Hunter Wilds after Rise?
All of these devices are Xbox, but only one of them has thousands of high quality AAA games. The others have a few dozen at best.
Why didn’t Take Two come back with Civilization 7?
Xbox owns Call of Duty, Candy Crush, World of Warcraft, and Minecraft.
It’s certainly not going anywhere.
That’s a huge problem for the health of the store, in my view.
It should be doing more to bake in community tools on PC for developers to engage with their customers.
It’s still relatively early days since Microsoft shifted strategy here, and maybe I’m being impatient.
