Last night, Microsoft announced that Rise of the Tomb Raider would be releasing exclusively on Xbox consoles in 2015. Third-party-published games rarely, if ever, limit themselves to just one platform these days. It brought up the question of whether or not Tomb Raider would eventually come to other platforms. Today, we got an answer.
“Yes, the deal has a duration,” says head of Microsoft’s Xbox division, Phill Spencer, in an interview. “I didn’t buy it. I don’t own the franchise.” So, the Rise of the Tomb Raider will eventually come to other systems if Square Enix, the game’s publisher, chooses to do so. Spencer remains coy on the duration of their exclusivity deal.
“It’s not because I’m trying to be a headfake on anybody,” Spencer says in defense of his silence on the matter. “It’s a deal between us and the partner. People ask me how much did we pay. There are certain things I’m just not going to talk about because it’s a business deal between us and them. Obviously the deal does have a duration. I didn’t buy the IP in perpetuity.”
Third-party platform-exclusive titles haven’t been commonplace since the days of the PS2/Xbox/GameCube era, nearly a decade ago. Since then, the only platform-exclusive titles to be released were published by the platform holders themselves.
Rise of the Tomb Raider will be released sometime in the holiday season of 2015 for Xbox 360 and Xbox One.
Rise of the Tomb Raider is available for pre-order on Amazon:
