Horizon Zero Dawn Xbox Release Swiftly Addressed

There might be a million memes about console exclusives floating around at the moment, with more and more games appearing on other platforms after spending some time as the baby of one manufacturer.

One of the most notable examples in recent times has been Horizon Zero Dawn, Guerilla Games' immense action RPG romp that sees players take on massive dinosaur-like machines in a dystopian future.

It's easily one of the coolest original IPs to hit PlayStation consoles in the last decade or more and it was, therefore, pretty inevitable that attention was going to turn to whether players on other platforms were going to get to play it (without borrowing a friend's precious hardware).

PC players got their wish in August 2020, as the first game debuted on Steam, with the sequel, Forbidden West, also arriving on the same storefront in 2024 after a period of exclusivity on the PlayStation.

That sadly left Xbox players without much to do other than sit on their hands and wait for news, and none has been forthcoming, with fans forced to look for scraps amongst the leaks and rumours about its potential arrival on the console.

Over on Reddit, one user shared a potential source of hope, after a link to the game was found in the German Xbox storefront. Indeed, using a search engine does bring up an Xbox result at the time of writing, though this isn't the exciting news that it may first appear as.

As many of the comments under the original post note, this is actually a result of the foibles of search engines, rather than a groundbreaking discovery that hints at the game's imminent arrival.

For an as yet unknown reason, the German version of the Xbox store is having its search queries indexed by Google, rather than actual listings. This means that you can basically search for any PlayStation exclusive game and it will appear as an Xbox store link in Germany specifically.

That unfortunate system led to several games being rumoured as potential Xbox arrivals in the past, including Ghost of Tsushima and The Last of Us 2.

Sorry not to be the bearers of better news this time around, Xbox gamers, but with increased cross-compatibility seemingly going on all over the place, you shouldn't hopefully have too long to wait.

Plus, there's plenty to be getting along with on Game Pass anyway, so there should be plenty to do whilst you're waiting.