Thanks to today's Nintendo Direct focused on third-party gameswe now know the identity of two of the four Xbox titles that Microsoft is committed to releasing on “other consoles”. One of them is Penment, which is coming to Nintendo Switch on February 22 (that's tomorrow). The other is a multiplayer title Basedwhich will arrive on Switch on April 16.
Penment 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 says would never have been possible without Game Pass.
“The old mentality of publishers and developers is generally focused on bigger investments with higher (return on investment), and that's not the point in this environment, in this ecosystem,” Sawyer said. Waypoint radio, as noted Eurogamer. “(Game Pass) is the only way I see (Penment) being viable.”
This makes it particularly intriguing that Xbox chose Penment as one of four games it offers on other consoles (it should be noted that the number of Game Pass subscribers in fact, he hasn't grown much over the past two years). Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said earlier this month that the titles in question have all been on Xbox and PC for at least a year and have reached their “full potential” on those platforms.
Two of the games are community focused (i.e. multiplayer titles) and Based is clearly one of them. THE Honey, I reduced the children-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 intended to be built as a sort of platform exclusivity and all the fanfare that goes around that, but games that our teams really wanted to build,” Spencer said. Penment more or less falls into this category and would have been considered one of the games to be released on Switch and/or PlayStation. The other two Xbox games expected on other consoles are Rush to Hi-Fi And Sea of Thieves.