Xbox chief Phil Spencer has taken to Twitter to reply to fans asking what he thought about Capcom's Street Fighter V only being released to PlayStation and PC.
A trailer for the next game in the Street Fighter franchise was accidentally released last week, with PlayStation releasing more details about the game on Monday.
"Business deals happen," said Spencer on Twitter. "We won't do all of them. When we have a 1st party franchise in a genre I'd rather invest in ours."
"I'd love it if Xbox fans could play all of the games, but business just makes some deals happen," he said in another Tweet. "It's all part of competition."
That competition, Spencer says, is important, and good for the industry.
"I appreciate the competition, they do good work," he said in another tweet. "I just focus on us and like you say, I think that makes us better."
Spencer also went on to talk about the idea of the PlayStation Experience event, which he seemed to like. He did not mention whether there would be a similar Xbox-focused event in the future, but he said having good E3 and Gamescom events are important. E3 is the game industry's big trade event, while Gamescom bills itself as the world's biggest game event, with players and industry people attending. Microsoft now has the X0 tradeshow featuring its Xbox line as well as other Windows games.
"I liked the X0 events," he said. "Maybe have our own dedicated event would be better, but having a great E3 and Gamescom is important."
Street Fighter V was officially announced on Dec. 6 at the PlayStation Experience event in Las Vegas. The game will be available on both PlayStation4 and PC, and will support cross-platform gaming, meaning that gamers will be able to battle opponents on the other platform. This kind of cross-platform gaming, however, has traditionally been a nightmare for gamers, with errors and bugs being numerous. Fighting games such as Street Fighter V should be up to the task, but only time will tell. There has been no word on how much time, however. An official release date for the game has not yet been given.
The fact that the game will not be making it to Xbox is certainly interesting. It is highly likely that Sony and game publisher Capcom made a rather large deal about the game, especially considering the success of previous Street Fighter games and the number of copies that could be sold if the game was available on all platforms. Originally it was suspected that the exclusivity may be timed and that the game would eventually make its way to Xbox, however we now know that not to be true.
