Developer Direct round-up: the big questions about Xbox’s 2025 line-up
GameCentral gives an overview of the latest Xbox Developer Direct and is impressed by the quality of the games and the density of Microsoft’s release schedule.
They may be a tad overproduced, with that tinge of insincerity that seems to permeate most Microsoft events, but the Xbox Developer Directs are now firmly established as something to genuinely look forward to.
Nintendo Directs are still the gold standard for such showcases, with their usually endless stream of reveals and a minimum of blather, but Microsoft’s equivalents are far more consistent than Sony’s consistently disappointing State of Play events.
The first Developer Direct of the year has become particularly reliable Entertainment, with this year’s showcasing Doom: The Dark Ages, Ninja Gaiden 4, South Of Midnight, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
None of the games had release dates prior to Thursday but what stood out is that apart from Ninja Gaiden 4 – which hadn’t been announced till now and only has a vague autumn 2025 date – everything else is out in either April or May.
That’s a surprise, as together with Avowed in February (and Indiana Jones And The Great Circle on PlayStation 5 this spring) that is a very stacked first half of the year. So stacked in fact that it seems to almost guarantee that there will be other big Microsoft published games released in the second half of the year, beyond just Activision Blizzard titles such as this year’s Call Of Duty.
Fable and The Outer Worlds 2 are nominally due this year, but they have no date and Microsoft has never talked about them in detail, leading to many assuming they’d be delayed. Their release this autumn now seems far more certain, perhaps accompanied by other surprises.
There’s also the prospect of Perfect Dark and/or Gears Of War: E-Day but it seems more likely that Microsoft will leave them to next year. After all, it promised it would get into a regular cadence of new releases but Microsoft has promised a lot over the years and rarely delivered.
But now it seems clear that their plan to never go more than a few months without a first party release – at least in terms of something they’ve published, not necessarily something made by an internal studio – is coming true.
And yet almost all these games are multiformat releases, also coming to PlayStation 5 and, probably in most cases, Nintendo Switch 2.
If Microsoft had been putting out this many high quality games even just a few years ago then their hardware sales might never have collapsed and they wouldn’t necessarily have needed to buy Activision Blizzard, and go third party, at all.
It’s a chicken and egg situation though. If they hadn’t bought Activision Blizzard they wouldn’t have been under so much pressure to go multiformat or to get their publishing business in order.
Although there is the question of how well any of these games will sell. Doom and Ninja Gaiden have never been massive sellers, and few would bet on Avowed breaking any records. South Of Midnight and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 did look very good but they’re clearly not blockbusters either.
But if Microsoft is happy to continue publishing such games, then that’s the best news any gamer could ask for: a massively rich company indulging and publishing avant-garde games that it already knows aren’t going to make a dent in their profit margins.
The situation is peculiar, and you’ve got to ask how long it will last, but while Microsoft made no attempt to explain their multiformat policy (no execs were featured in the Direct, which is another reason why they’re so good) the only one that was still an Xbox console exclusive is South Of Midnight.
That’s probably because it’s by a smaller studio and they didn’t have the capacity to make a PlayStation 5 version yet. Although, as ever, there’s still a degree of uncertainty about whether Microsoft has entirely given up on the concept of exclusives. But if Fable is on PlayStation 5 from the start, or within three months like Indiana Jones, that surely is the end of any further prevarication.
There’s an intense irony in the fact that the moment Microsoft has chosen to go multiformat is also when their publishing schedules finally gain a sense of consistent quality and variety. Perhaps these games will actually prove to be disappointments – after all, we haven’t played any of them yet – but they’re definitely all interesting and exciting, and at this stage that’s all that matters.
Developer Direct round-up: the big questions about Xbox’s 2025 line-up
