Xbox bets big on 2024, hopes to avoid last year’s mistake

Xbox bets big on 2024, hopes to avoid last year’s mistake

Time Stamp: June 11, 2023 4:20 PM

Coming out of Sunday’s Xbox Games Showcase, you’d get the unmistakable impression that Xbox is betting big on 2024 with Avowed, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, and more. It sounded a whole lot like Xbox’s big 2022 strategy: pinning everything on 2023. So, how’d that pan out?

Following the 2022 Xbox Games Showcase, Microsoft claimed on Twitter that 50 games would come to Xbox and PC “over the next 12 months.” The list was a grab bag — a mix of new first-party and third-party games, Game Pass perks, Xbox ports of already-published titles (like Valheim), and updates to ongoing live-service games (like Halo Infinite).

Many of the games Xbox cited did come out during that 12-month window. Some of the third-party tentpoles — including Diablo 4, plus the Dead Space and Resident Evil 4 remakes — were immediate commercial and critical successes. Some were met with varying but generally middling degrees of staying power: Gotham Knights, Somerville, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, High on Life, Atomic Heart. First-party fare? Uh, we don’t need to talk about first-party fare (hello, Redfall).

Of the total list of 50 games, 12 have yet to come out, and only three currently have solid release dates:

  • Lightyear Frontier
  • Party Animals (now planned for Sept. 20)
  • Starfield (now planned for Sept. 6)
  • Forza Motorsport (now planned for Oct. 10)
  • Flintlock
  • Ark 2
  • Ara: History Untold
  • Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes
  • STALKER 2
  • Replaced
  • Ereban: Shadow Legacy
  • Cocoon

Replaced and STALKER 2 are being developed by studios based in Ukraine, which has been embroiled in a war against Russian aggressors since February 2022. Cocoon is set to appear during the Annapurna Interactive Showcase, scheduled for June 29. Ark 2 stars Vin Diesel (and more importantly, has been delayed to 2024). The rest are pegged as “coming soon” or a vague “2023.”

After today’s showcase, Microsoft took a different tack than it did last year. Rather than stating any hard timeline for its forthcoming slate, it instead tweeted that the 2023 Xbox Showcase lineup was “giving play day one.”

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