It looks like Kena: Bridge of Spirits may finally be making its way to Microsoft’s console, indicating that PlayStation’s time exclusivity agreement is over.
Kena launched on PlayStation in 2021 and while it was never officially confirmed, many people speculated that developer Ember Lab may have signed a timed exclusivity deal with Sony. Ember Labs themselves confirmed this in an interview with SegmentNext around the time of the game’s launch. When asked about the game only appearing on the Epic Games Store, Co-founder and COO of Ember Lab, Josh Grier said that “We are currently focused in our launches for PlayStation and Epic Games store, which are timed exclusives. We will look into other platform releases after launch and a rest.”
The game then made its way to PC in 2022.
When asked on Twitter in 2023 about the possibility of the game coming to Xbox, Ember Labs simply replied “Never give up!”.
Now, it looks like that timed exclusivity window may finally be coming to a close. US ratings board the ESRB has listed Kena: Bridge of Spirits on Xbox Series consoles. While it’s always possible for accidents to occur, it’s unusual for a ratings board to list something without good reason as the game has to first be submitted.
Kena: Bridge of Spirits holds a pretty good Opencritic score of 81. While no sales numbers have ever been shared, in an interview conducted with Bloomberg in 2021, Josh Grier of Ember Labs said that Sony was happy with its performance.