This just in: Diablo 4 is the first Microsoft owned game to officially run best on a competitor’s platform, the PlayStation 5 Pro.
Diablo franchise head Rod Fergusson, the head of the Diablo franchise, broke the news on social media, expressing pride in his team’s efforts. While specific details about the upgrades remain under wraps, players can look forward to leveraging the PS5 Pro’s advanced capabilities to elevate their demon-slaying adventures in Sanctuary.
The PS5 Pro, set to launch in November with a “reasonable” price tag of $700, is an impressive piece of hardware that boasts several hardware improvements over the incumbent base model. With a more powerful GPU offering up to 45% faster rendering and enhanced ray-tracing capabilities, the console promises to deliver sharper visuals and smoother performance for compatible titles, including Diablo 4, which has so far rebounded following its tumultuous start.
Diablo 4 joins a growing list of over 60 games confirmed to receive enhancements on the PS5 Pro. This exclusive PS5 Pro Enhanced club includes titles from various publishers and developers, but what’s noteworthy is that Diablo 4 isn’t just any game—it’s a Microsoft-owned title.
One of the biggest contentions about Microsoft’s successful buyout of Activision Blizzard was that it would end up owning several best-selling video game franchises, starting with Call of Duty. Blizzard owns IPs like StarCraft, WarCraft, and Diablo, among hundreds of others, potentially giving Microsoft an unfair edge over the competition should they leverage this advantage. But so far, they have not done anything with it. Instead, Microsoft and Xbox are willingly rolling over and giving Sony what should’ve been theirs to keep. And while this is good in the short-term, it does harm any chances of Microsoft competing with Sony.
Sure, Call of Duty is still and will be available on PlayStation for the foreseeable future, but Microsoft could’ve pressed more and kept its few worthy exclusives to itself. Instead, the company is opening the door for more of its games to become available on PlayStation and that’s not all, with Diablo 4, they’ll run best on the competition.
What makes this particularly damaging for Xbox is there’s no longer an incentive to buy an Xbox for exclusives. Unless you already own an Xbox, you might as well get a PlayStation 5, or better yet, a PlayStation 5 Pro, because Xbox exclusives are coming to PlayStation anyway. Although it won’t happen at launch, PlayStation 5 has far more exclusive titles available.
Sure, the Xbox Game Pass is great and you get so many games for so little price. It just isn’t reasonable to expect Microsoft to keep growing a subscription service that doesn’t have FOMO appeal.
It’s no secret that the video game industry runs on people flocking to the next shiny thing. It’s one of the reasons why Black Myth: Wukong got so big, so fast. It blew up in China and eventually went viral across the world. It wasn’t exclusive to the PlayStation by design but Sony benefitted from Xbox’s inaction.
Phil Spencer has been running interference lately, helping developers get their games certified on Xbox and striking deals with Japanese video game companies like Square Enix, who are looking for ways to pad their bottom line by releasing their games on Xbox and PC after years of exclusively working with Sony—Square Enix’s port of Final Fantasy 16 on PC isn’t doing too well—but Japan alone can’t move the financial needle enough for the Xbox brand.
With Indiana Jones and the Great Circle coming to PlayStation 5 next year and Diablo 4 kicking off an incoming line of PS5 Pro Enhanced Xbox-owned titles, you can’t help but feel bad for existing Xbox owners who are seeing fewer and fewer reasons to stick to the platform as Xbox struggles to establish its new identity as a pseudo-publisher.
