Will 2024 be a milestone year for Xbox? (Picture: Microsoft)

GameCentral tries to predict what the new year holds in store for Xbox, in terms of new games and Call Of Duty coming to Game Pass.

We’ve already tried to take an educated guess at what Sony’s plans for 2024 might be and it wasn’t easy to come to a clear conclusion. Sony has said so little in recent months, and currently has so few games publicly announced, that they’re almost impossible to read at the moment, especially given they have a new boss incoming. Even Nintendo has never felt this needlessly secretive and yet Xbox is not much better.

We’ll cover Nintendo in a subsequent article but in theory their plans are reasonably easy to guess at, with many games already scheduled for this year and the seeming inevitability of the Switch 2. Sony is widely rumoured to be preparing a reveal for the PS5 Pro but while there have been whispers of Microsoft wanting to kickstart the next generation early there are no serious suggestions of them having any major new hardware this year.

Instead, their plans revolve, as they have for some time, around software and subscriptions. The biggest Xbox news this year won’t be a new game reveal or release date announcement, but the point at which Activision Blizzard games, including Call Of Duty, will be available free on Game Pass. There is no indication of when that will be, but it seems fair to imagine that Microsoft’s marketing won’t allow you to miss it when it happens.

At the end of last year there seemed to be hints, from certain Microsoft execs, that the long-term goal for Xbox was to get its software, including Game Pass, onto PlayStation and Nintendo formats. How this would affect Microsoft’s hardware business wasn’t mentioned, but as talk of going third party quickly spread Xbox boss Phil Spencer stepped in to clarify that isn’t going to happen… in the short term at least.

Already this year, there’s talk of previously exclusive first party Xbox games appearing on PlayStation 5 and/or Switch but so far nothing definitive from Microsoft. Even so, it does seem increasingly likely that the future of Xbox is no longer that of being a console alternative to PlayStation – a similar slab of plastic sitting under your TV, playing mostly the same games – but something increasingly service based and hardware independent.

Given how poorly the Xbox continues to sell in Europe and Japan that’s almost a necessity at this point, even if it’s hard to imagine any major change coming through this year. How much Call Of Duty on Game Pass changes the landscape will have a huge influence on Microsoft’s future plans, but that’s not going to make a substantial difference in 2024.

Instead, Microsoft is likely to want to regroup after the disappointment of Starfield, which did not become the critical darling it hoped. It won’t be brushed under the carpet though and you’re guaranteed to hear a lot about additions and changes, including fan-made mods and the first paid-for DLC.

Avowed and Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 don’t have release dates, but they are meant to be out this year, so they’ll also be a priority, especially as virtually nothing has been seen of Avowed so far. It was originally marketed as a straight Skyrim clone, by Fallout: New Vegas developer Obsidian Entertainment, but that was before Microsoft bought Bethesda and it’s likely that had at least some effect on the game’s approach.

Microsoft will also want to build on the success of its summer showcase, in terms of both its content and the skill with which it was put together. It easily outshone the PlayStation equivalent and introduced numerous, previously unannounced games that Microsoft can now go into in more detail, throughout the course of the year.

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Both quantity and quality are important for Xbox right now, when it comes to its exclusives, as despite all the tens of billions spent on acquiring new developers Microsoft has still done little to turn around the Xbox One’s reputation for underwhelming exclusives.

Starfield was supposed to change that narrative, but if not it then perhaps one of this year’s new games will achieve the same goal. If Xbox intends to focus more on games than hardware, then those games have to be good enough to attract new customers and not just placate existing Xbox owners. Call Of Duty may be enough to do that but hopefully 2024 will show us that Microsoft has more than just that up their sleeve.

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GameCentral tries to predict what the new year holds in store for Xbox, in terms of new games and Call Of Duty coming to Game Pass.