At the Xbox business update podcast Phil Spencer confirmed that part of the recent rumours are indeed true.

Four as yet unnamed Xbox exclusives are coming to PlayStation 5 with announcements due in the not too distant future.

While Phil didn’t name any of the games as they all have announcements planned by their respective studios he did say that Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are NOT planned for PlayStation.

All we do know is two of them have “a live service component” which seems to confirm speculation that the almost 6 year old Sea of Thieves is one of the four.

Hi-Fi RUSH, Pentiment and Grounded are expected to be the remaining three titles.

Sea of Thieves will celebrate its 6th anniversary next month so that would be a perfect time to announce the game for new platforms.

Alongside the four games hinted at Phil also suggested that Xbox will be keeping exclusive games going forward and that Microsoft is definitely not releasing all of its games on PlayStation and is not leaving the hardware space and becoming third party.

Clearly they are testing the reception and profit making potential of some of their older titles that have gotten as much out of Xbox as they can. I would expect some other older titles from Xbox to make the jump if these four do well.

It probably wouldn’t be the worst idea for Sony to consider a similar approach by releasing older first party titles on Xbox like Spider-Man which has probably sold all of the copies it’s going to sell on PlayStation after 5 years. So why not tap the 20+ million Xbox Series S|X owners for a few extra quid?

So there we have it. Most of the rumours, as expected were over exaggerated and were very wide of the mark.