There’s something quietly quite exciting happening, and I wonder where it’s going to lead. Earlier this week, Grounded – the Honey I Shrunk the Kids backyard survival game – arrived on PlayStation, and at the end of the month (30th April) pirating game Sea of Thieves arrives on PlayStation too. It’s a momentous occasion, even though it might not sound it, because we’ve never had games conceived as Xbox exclusives arrive on PlayStation before. It’s an unprecedented new approach by Microsoft and, should it work, it could open a whole Mary Poppins bag of possibility.
I don’t want to talk about the colder business case for it, because that’s not what excites me. What excites me is what it means for players and, I suppose, for the games themselves. How wonderful it feels to be excited about these games again, which are now a number of years old. We first played Sea of Thieves in early 2018, and Grounded in mid-2020, and they were terrifically exciting then, but now they’re not. They’ve been with us so long they’ve become familiar. No one’s pulling you aside and asking you, raw enthusiasm in their eyes, if you’ve played them yet.
Well, not yet.
