Head of Xbox’s Phil Spencer Will Guest Star on Animal Crossing Talk Show Next Week

This coming Wednesday, August 12, 2020, head of Xbox Phil Spencer will be appearing on the Animal Crossing: New Horizons themed talk show, Animal Talking. Animal Talking is hosted by Rogue One: A Star Wars Story co-writer Gary Whitta. The show unfolds in the Animal Crossing world on the Switch on a makeshift television studio that has been setup in-game.

Barely recovered from last night’s episode, but now it’s straight onto next week’s! I’ll be joined by Head of Xbox @XboxP3 as well as @dylansprouse and musical guest @LisaLoeb who will be performing LIVE! Can’t wait 🙂 pic.twitter.com/c5IK9Wmcml

— Gary Whitta (@garywhitta) August 6, 2020

It’s very cool to see this crossover happen with the top dog over at Xbox appearing on a Nintendo themed talk show. Xbox and Nintendo have become progressively more buddy buddy recently. Not too long ago we saw both companies previously working together to bring cross-play between the Xbox One and the Nintendo Switch while Sony sat on the sidelines.

Xbox and Nintendo have an increasingly close relationship and this isn’t by chance. Two companies clearly are not in a direct competition with one another. They have both realized that it is mutually beneficial to work together and bolster cross-play while Sony continues to lag behind in this area. Over the last year or so, both Xbox and Nintendo have come together on some pretty large initiatives.

Back in 2018, Minecraft players on the Switch could play with friends on an Xbox One console and any other platform (except for the PS4). Microsoft spent billions of dollars acquiring Minecraft, only to turn around and continue supporting the game as a multi-platform title. Nintendo and Microsoft went so far with this that they released this joint commercial together titled “Play Together”:

It was through this Minecraft cross-play that Xbox saw an opportunity to bring a “limited” form of Xbox Live to the Switch. After booting up Minecraft, players on the Switch could sign into their Xbox Live account. This was then taken even further when Xbox announced their plans for Xbox Live to be integrated on a system level for the Switch. This would allow players to each achievements, access their Xbox live friends list, and other perks links to an Xbox Live account. They released the following statement at the annual Game Developers Conference:

“Xbox Live is about to get MUCH bigger,” a panel description said. “Xbox Live is expanding from 400M gaming devices and a reach to over 68M active players to over 2B devices with the release of our new cross-platform XDK. Get a first look at the [software development kit] to enable game developers to connect players between iOS, Android, and Switch in addition to Xbox and any game in the Microsoft Store on Windows PCs.”

That’s not the end either, as we have also seen key Xbox titles make their way towards the Switch. Other than Minecraft, Xbox has ported over games like Hellblade and Cuphead as well.

Moving forward, it seems likely to expect for more Xbox titles to continue to appear on the Nintendo Switch. Xbox has made it pretty clear that their main focus in the future isn’t necessarily selling consoles, but mainly getting people playing content they are associated with. They have put a lot of resources into their Game Pass subscription service and will even be allowing many titles to have cross-play between the Xbox One and the Xbox Series X out the gate.

Whether we will ever see Xbox’s Game Pass service on another console that isn’t Microsoft branded remains to be seen. It’s unclear what incentive Nintendo would have to host the service on the Switch, with many arguing that this may actually detract the overall software sales on the Nintendo eShop.

It is really awesome to see these two gaming giants working together these days and seeing the head of Xbox, Phil Spencer, appearing on an Animal Crossing themed talk show warms our hearts.