Xbox Game Studios News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

It is official: no shadow-drop game will be unveiled during the Xbox Developer Direct 2024. Or at least that appears to be the case. Let’s talk about this news.

The mysterious, long-rumoured Halo battle royale project from series co-developer Certain Affinity is no longer in development, a new report has claimed.

Paramount has released a new trailer for its Halo TV adaptation, as we approach the start date for season two.

With the launch of last year's Forza Motorsport — and an initial flurry of patches and fixes — behind it, developer Turn 10 Studios has confirmed its next steps for the racer will be to address three key community concerns over the «coming months».

We didn't review Turn 10 and Microsoft's latest Forza Motorsport and well, thank goodness, because I've just taken a look at the Steam page and it's a regular six-mile pile-up in there. The game's user reviews are Mostly Negative, three months after release, with complaints covering a wide gamut: the online being full of cheaters, the single player being boring, and the game being poorly optimised for PC.

Microsoft will show off a first look at its Indiana Jones game during a new Xbox Developer Direct broadcast later this month.

Following speculation Microsoft may be considering bringing its acclaimed Hi-Fi Rush to Switch, new reports have claimed the company has also been looking into a PlayStation and Switch release for developer Rare's acclaimed multiplayer pirate adventure Sea of Thieves.

When it first leaked as Overdose, it was believed that Kojima Productions’ new IP would be a horror title, albeit one with director Hideo Kojima’s signature twists (and potentially related to Death Stranding). However, upon its reveal as OD, it’s looking to be a lot more complicated than initially believed. The developer trademarked terms like Social Scream System and Social Stealth, and it’s confirmed to utilize Xbox’s cloud-native technology.

Microsoft announced that Activision Blizzard CEO is finally stepping down, effective December 29. He is not the only high-profile departure, though Microsoft intends to leave most of the company’s management in place.  

Microsoft has announced that Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, will be stepping down on December 29th. Instead of a replacement, Blizzard president Mike Ybarra and Activision publishing president Rob Kostich will report to Microsoft Gaming game content and studios president Matt Booty, per The Verge. Activision Blizzard vice chair Thomas Tippl is also leaving in March 2024 but reports to Booty till then.

I haven't checked in on Microsoft Flight Simulator for a while, but the aviation 'em up hasn't missed a beat. Last month it received World Update 15, continuing increase the detail of its global landscape with a visit to Greenland and the Nordics. Now Asobo have released City Update 5: European Cities 1, which brings a similar pass of polish to five "exemplary urban regions".

Microsoft has announced a range of offers across a selection of Xbox games, as well as its Series X/S consoles and Elite controllers.

With Hideo Kojima having unveiled his studio’s next game, OD, recently during The Game Awards 2023, the Internet has already gotten to work to decode hidden messages that the developer typically likes to sneak into his announcements. The TGA 2023 trailer for OD has been discovered to feature an interesting message, potentially nodding at Kojima’s cancelled Silent Hills.

Hideo Kojima turned up at The Game Awards 2023 to reveal OD, the Xbox-exclusive project that he has been working on. It is, shall we say, quite… odd.

INTERIOR/NIGHT will release narrative adventure game As Dusk Falls for PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 via PlayStation Store on March 7, 2024 for $29.99, the developer announced. Serenity Forge will distribute a physical edition for PlayStation 5 in spring 2024 for $44.99. Both physical and digital pre-orders are available now.

Publisher Xbox Game Studios and developer Kojima Productions have announced OD, a game that “explores the concept of testing your fear threshold.” Platforms and a release date were not announced.

As Dusk Falls — previously an Xbox exclusive — is heading to PlayStation consoles on 7th March, as announced at tonight's Game Awards show.

Well, I bet you didn't see this coming from Ori And The Blind Forest developers Moon Studios, did you now? Then again, neither did I. Announced during tonight's Game Awards, No Rest For The Wicked is quite a different kettle of cursed fish compared to Moon's previous games, but I'm also quietly intrigued by it at the same time. For starters, this is an online ARPG that combines the top-down combat of games like Diablo 4 with the patient, weighty boss battles of your Elden Soulslikes. Come and watch its reveal trailer below to find out more.

It's taken five and a half years of asking from the community, but Sea of Thieves' oft-requested private servers are almost here, with Rare now confirming the feature will arrive as part of the multiplayer pirate adventure's third major Season 10 update on Thursday, 7th December.

Xbox might be working on bringing new features and improvements to its Achievements system. In an interview with Windows Central, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer talks about bringing improvements to the system, which has been largely the same since its original introduction all the way back with the launch of the Xbox 360.

The second season of Paramount's Halo adaptation will have its premier on 8th February.

It's a good time to be a strategy game developer, according to Oxide Games, developers of Ara: History Untold, which happens to be a strategy game. Speaking to me during a showing of Ara - which is notable among turn-based 4X games for playing out every player's turn simultaneously - the creators offered a rousing characterisation of the genre, suggesting that strategy games have somewhat shucked off their association with stifling complexity and elitism, thanks not least to the recent influence of board gaming.

Grounded is currently available to play for free on Steam, at least until tomorrow.

Forza Customs is a new game in the Forza series that arrives today on mobile.

Paramount Plus is now available on both Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One consoles in several new markets, including the UK and Ireland.

As we stroll gamely into month two of Sea of Thieves' extremely long-delayed Season 10, Rare has announced that the second of its three big tentpole features — the new PvP-focused Skull of the Siren Song voyage — will arrive next Thursday, 16th November.

Microsoft has recently been implementing leadership changes for its Xbox division, as part of which vice president Sarah Bond was promoted to president, and Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty to president of game content and studios, and it has now been confirmed who will be stepping in the take up the latter’s vacant position.

Microsoft is teaming up with Inworld AI to create game development tools for Xbox, enabling developers to create characters, generate entire scripts and quests, and more. The multi-year deal brings an AI design copilot and an AI character runtime engine to the forefront, both of them being totally optional to use and to varying degrees. Of course, the use of AI in art has been criticised by many for simply lacking originality, in addition to running the risk of fewer jobs for artists — a growing fear among many considering the alarming number of layoffs seen at game studios this year in an attempt to cut costs.

The newest update to co-op survival crafting game Grounded brings with with a new mode, dubbed Playgrounds mode, which essentially allows players to craft their own levels from the ground up. The update, dubbed the Make it And Break it update, is out on PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.

Grounded will get a new update, titled “Make It and Break It” on November 13th, that will add a brand new “Gadgets and Gizmos” suite of building and creation tools that will let you transform the backyard. 

Microsoft is shaking up ’s upper management following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The company hopes that the reorganization will help prevent a repeat of Redfall’s disastrous launch.

The shape of Microsoft’s gaming efforts is obviously going to change in significant ways in the coming months and years courtesy of its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, and part of that is already being put in motion, starting with the company having reorganized its Xbox leadership team, as reported by The Verge.

Microsoft is shaking up ’s upper management following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The company hopes that the reorganization will help prevent a repeat of Redfall’s disastrous launch.

has been a big success for Bethesda and Microsoft. Not only was it thebest-selling game in the US for September, but it’s also been a significant boon for Game Pass. According to Microsoft, the day of Starfield’s launch set a record for the highest number of new Game Pass subscribers.

With Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard finally complete, the company controls a larger than ever share of the game industry. According to CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft now plans to double down on game publishing and development.

Sea of Thieves is kicking off its tenth season, bringing with it a host of new features. Headlining the update is the ability for players to form Guilds, allowing them to unite under a single banner to take on greater challenges.

With Activision Blizzard officially part of Xbox, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer has discussed some plans for the future in a recent Xbox podcast. He confirmed that no titles from the publisher would come to Game Pass this year, though 2024 is more reasonable, and the era of exclusive betas and skins for Call of Duty on other platforms is over.

Microsoft has officially welcomed Activision Blizzard to Xbox following the Competition and Markets Authority’s approval of the acquisition in the UK. The deadline was originally for October 18th and is for $68.7 billion. With its completion, studios like Treyarch, Infinity Ward, Blizzard Entertainment, King and many more are now part of Xbox.

Released last month, Starfield is the biggest game Bethesda Softworks ever made, featuring 120 star systems and almost 1,700 planets. While it was only a matter of time before someone explored them all, one ambitious Starfield player had already scanned all 1,695 worlds.

Yesterday was quite eventful for Xbox as several unredacted documents from Microsoft’s court case with the Federal Trade Commission leaked. Not only did they confirm the existence of several unannounced projects, like a sequel to Ghostwire: Tokyo and Dishonored 3, but a mid-gen refresh for the Xbox Series X/S and its next-gen console being a hybrid cloud platform.

Microsoft’s lineup of first party studios is an impressive one, to say the very least, not only because of how large it is, but also given the pedigree of so many developers that fall under the first party Xbox Game Studios wing. At the same time, however, Microsoft is also working on upcoming exclusives with external, third party partners that will be published under the Xbox Game Studios banner.

is a big hit for Bethesda, though the game isn’t without faults. A slow start and weak main plot are the most common criticisms across Starfield reviews. Meanwhile, some players also find its characters subtly off-putting. One veteran game developer recently explained why this is, pointing out subtle but noticeable problems with Starfield’s facial animations. 

Bethesda’s officially launched on Wednesday after about a week of early access. The game’s already proven to be a big hit, with over 6 million players, making it the biggest launch in Bethesda’s history. Interestingly, the game’s high profile also seems to be helping one of its competitors, with Hello Games’s seeing massive spikes in players leading up to Starfield’s release.

Turn-based strategy game Ara: History Untold will launch for PC via Steam and Microsoft Store in 2024, publisher Xbox Game Studios and developer Oxide Interactive announced as part of Gamescom 2023: Opening Night Live.