Gaming on mobile might be changed forever, as the ecosystems of Google and Apple will soon have a new competitor to think about. Microsoft has announced that the new Xbox Mobile Game Store will launch this July.
The news come via Xbox president, Sarah Bond, who shared the news at the Bloomberg Technology Summit.
“We’re going to start actually by bringing our own first-party portfolio to that, so you’re going to see games like Candy Crush show up in that experience, games like Minecraft,” said Bond. “We’re going to start on the web, and we’re doing that because that really allows us to have it be an experience that’s accessible across all devices, all countries, no matter what and independent of the policies of closed ecosystem stores.”
It makes sense that Microsoft will be starting with its first-party portfolio for the Xbox Mobile Game Store, and it will be a good way of testing the waters before opening the floodgates for other partner titles that can take advantage of the foundations being laid.
Being a web-only platform is interesting, to say the least, if the aim is to bridge the gap between mobile, PC, and console gaming. It is likely that Microsoft will look to expand the territory of the Xbox Mobile Game Store to actual smartphones, but this is a start. This development comes after Microsoft first hinted at its plans for mobile in early 2022, following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
“We want to be in a position to offer Xbox and content from both us and our third-party partners across any screen where somebody would want to play,” said Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer in an interview with the Financial Times in 2023. “Today, we can’t do that on mobile devices but we want to build towards a world that we think will be coming where those devices are opened up.”
