Bucking a 26-year-old trend, PlayStation is releasing one of its own IP, Lego Horizon Adventures, on rival console Nintendo Switch.
Xbox, of course, has been slowly but surely ramping up its efforts to make some of its biggest IP cross-platform, most notably with Sea of Thieves' PS5 debut in April. Tango Gameworks' Hi-Fi Rush also hit PS4 and PS5 in April while Obsidian hits Pentiment and Grounded crossed over to both PlayStation and Nintendo Switch. A report from February claimed Starfield, Bethesda's Indiana Jones game, and other Xbox exclusives were lined up for PS5 launches, but that's as of yet unconfirmed.
As observed by GamesIndustry.biz, Lego Horizon Adventures will be the first PlayStation IP released on a Nintendo platform since Wipeout 64 launched exclusively on the N64 in 1998.
There are a couple caveats I want to go over just to contextualize all of this somewhat. The first is that MLB: The Show is a series developed by the PlayStation-owned developer San Diego Studio and published by PlayStation, and that's been cross-platform since 2021. However, the distinguisher here is that Lego Horizon Adventures is actually a PlayStation IP, at least as far as it's considered part of the Horizon series, whereas MLB The Show is a licensed IP as part of MLB Advanced Media. Basically, Aloy is a PlayStation character and Major League Baseball players aren't.
That's the perfect segue into my next caveat. While Lego Horizon Adventures' main character is undoubtedly a PlayStation icon, this is also explicitly a Lego crossover game, which to me makes its release on Nintendo Switch considerably less surprising and less indicative of any broader strategy at Sony. It's a noteworthy release regardless, but it doesn't carry the same significance as, say, The Last of Us releasing on Xbox or indeed, Starfield coming to PS5. Sony has been cozying up to PC in recent years, but whether Lego Horizon Adventures is the first crack in the floodgate of PlayStation IP coming to other consoles remains to be seen.
In the meantime, here are the best Switch games and the best PS5 games you can play right now.
Horizon Zero Dawn star Ashly Burch responds to Sony's controversial AI Aloy by pushing for actor protections: "You have to compensate us fairly, and you have to tell us how you're using this AI"
Horizon Zero Dawn's Aloy is the star of Sony's leaked AI-powered character prototype, which allows users to ask questions to an unsettling, emotionless version of the protagonist
