Microsoft has announced at the Bloomberg Technology Summit that it will be launching a new Xbox Mobile Gaming Store on web later in July this year. The gaming store will consist of first-party games from Microsoft’s own gaming studios, and could also be the first place you’d find new releases from the studios before it hits other publishers. Here are the details that have been revealed about the Xbox mobile gaming store from Microsoft.
Xbox president Sarah Bond, speaking at the summit, revealed that the mobile gaming store is coming in July. “We’re going to start by bringing our own first-party portfolio, so you’re going to see games like Candy Crush show up in that experience, games like Minecraft,”says 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.”
Aside from the first-party titles, Bond conveyed that the company will extend this to partners too, sometime in the future. According to her, there isn’t a gaming platform and store experience that “goes truly across devices — where who you are, your library, your identity, your rewards travel with you versus being locked to a single ecosystem.” Microsoft’s Xbox mobile gaming store will aim to build such an experience.
Read More: PlayStation Reverses Decision on Helldivers 2 PSN Account Linking Requirement
She adds that Microsoft will extend beyond the web in future which means the organisation may also be planning to launch a full-fledged App store that will challenge the duopoly of Apple and Google’s App store and Play Store, respectively. Because the store will be made available on Web, it’ll be accessible widely across platforms and countries and will also allow the Xbox to bypass the rules and restrictions set in place by Apple and Google for making apps available via their own app stores.
The content available on the mobile gaming store will be fully revealed once the store launches, but one can expect titles from Activision to also show up in that store, such as Call of Duty: Mobile, Warzone Mobile and more. It’s possible that future new releases from these gaming studios will first arrive on the web store and then to Google Play Store and Apple App store, thereby maintaining exclusivity.