The facts first: in February 2019, while the rumor circulated that Scalebound, PlatinumGames’ canceled action game for the Xbox One, might be resurrected as a Switch exclusive, researcher Liam Robertson joined the conversation. Known as Game History Guy, he usually reveals information about canceled games and projects that were never announced.
According to Robertson, the relationship between Microsoft and Nintendo was very good, but the two companies’ goal was not to bring Scalebound back. The idea would be another: a collaboration that would bring more Microsoft games to the Switch, after Minecraft and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, announced for the console in the February 13 Nintendo Direct. He said the companies had been talking about Microsoft’s role as a publisher for other platforms and that Hellblade would not be an isolated case, already in progress when Microsoft bought Ninja Theory in June 2018, but rather the second step of something bigger.
Translating the jargon: a rumor is a rumor, and none of this was officially confirmed at the time. But the signs pointed in the same direction. Hellblade was a game from a studio owned by Microsoft arriving on a rival console, something rare at that moment.
What came next
The numbers proved Robertson right. Hellblade came out on the Switch on April 11, 2019, and Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition, published by Microsoft itself, arrived on Nintendo’s console on September 27, 2019, announced in an Indie World. The launch came on the back of the working relationship between the companies, which had already brought Minecraft and Cuphead to the Switch. In practice, Game History Guy’s prediction aged better than many an official announcement.
Source: Liam Robertson, via Eurogamer.
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