Although Microsoft now owns MachineGames, there’s a chance that the licensee will demand a multiplatform release for Indy…

So, early last year, the resurrected LucasFilm Games announced that, on the one hand, Electronic Arts had lost exclusivity on the Star Wars license (so, for example, the Ubisoft+Massive Entertainment duo and Quantic Dream are working on a Star Wars game…), and on the other hand, it was announced that the Indiana Jones license had been given to MachineGames (the developers of the Wolfenstein games released since 2014), which at the time still belonged to Bethesda (=ZeniMax Media).

At that time, it was official that MachineGames would make a MULTIPLATFORM game out of the treasure hunter, which is almost sure that Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda (the transaction closed in March 2021!) cannot change because even though Redmond owns the studio, Disney holds the IP rights. Even Microsoft cannot get a modification from the mouse empire to prevent the Indiana Jones project from being made for PlayStation…

On Friday, Jez Corden, writing for Windows Central, said on the Xbox Two podcast (https://youtu.be/fel1UPbVZN4?t=8700) that something might have changed. Corden said that he thought the Indiana Jones game was almost certainly not Xbox-exclusive in response to a fan question. Still, then he may have added on purpose that he’d heard that a long time ago, so something may have changed about it, to which we say it could be a simple distraction to keep Microsoft from being annoyed at him.

Microsoft had honoured previous agreements regarding studio acquisitions. For example, Mikami Shinji’s studio Tango Gameworks’ game Ghostwire Tokyo was released for PlayStation 5 and PC, even though they were already part of Xbox Game Studios when the game was released. Psychonauts 2 also got a multiplatform release, as its developer Double Fine Productions made it into the Xbox family during development.

Therefore, we might be able to hope for a PlayStation 5 version unless it’s being put together by another outsourced studio, but it would look pretty silly if the game was created by MachineGames and the port work was outsourced to someone else…

Source: PSL