XBox has announced an important change in how they conduct game reveals in the future.

In an interview with XBox Era, Microsoft’s Phil Spencer confirmed that future XBox showcases will include the logos for Nintendo and Playstation platforms if the games are coming to those consoles. Previously, game reveal showcases would avoid mentioning if the games are coming to competitor consoles, but Spencer now wants XBox to be more “transparent” about where players can find their games.

 I think it’s just being honest and transparent about where the games are showing, and we actually even had this discussion last year for the June showcase, and by the time we kind of made our decision, we couldn’t get all of the assets done and it felt weird to have some of them in and some of them out.

But I just want to be transparent with people – for shipping on Nintendo Switch, we’re gonna put that. For shipping on PlayStation, on Steam…People should know the storefronts where they can get our games, but I want people to be able to experience our Xbox community in our games and everything we have to offer, on every screen we can.

And obviously not every screen is equal. Yeah, like there’s certain things we can’t do on the other closed platforms that we can do on open platforms, cloud – it’s different. But games should be the thing that we’re focused on. And the strategy that we have allows us to do big games, while also supporting our native platform from hardware to the platform and services that we have and that’s going to be our approach.

And I know it’s not what everybody else is doing, but I just believe games should be the thing that’s at the forefront. Maybe it’s because of how I’ve grown up in this industry. I came from building games. But I think the games are the things that I see growing in their strength in what we’re doing and it’s because more people can play. So yeah, I’m just trying to be open and transparent with people.

Part of this move may be due to the ongoing change in strategy for Microsoft to bring their games to more platforms. Later on in the interview, Spencer says that he is no longer “trying to move them [players] all over to Xbox” anymore, and they want to “just allow more people to play”.

 It’s maybe not what I was going to say on stand at the time. But yeah, I would love to make all of the money for all of the games that we ship right, like obviously we make more on our own platform. It’s one of the reasons that investing in our own platform is important. But there are people, whether it’s their libraries on a PlayStation or Nintendo, whether it’s they like the controller better, they just like the games that are there.

And I don’t want to then look at that and say, well, there’s no way that we should be able to build a business there, find fans of our franchises there. I’m not trying to move them all over to Xbox anymore. People were all so invested in where our games are.  Let’s just allow more people to play and yes, the 70% that we make on games on other platforms is helpful to us being able to build great portfolios like we showed at the Dev Direct and I hope this will continue to show through the rest of the year.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.