There's No Reason to Be Excited About New Xbox Game Announcements Anymore

The current console generation has seen some very bold moves from Xbox. Over the last few years, the company has greatly bolstered the number of studios that it owns, thanks to the acquisitions of Bethesda and Activision Blizzard. With such an incredible amount of talent and properties under one roof, this should be the best time ever to be an Xbox fan. However, there couldn’t be anything further from the truth. Between game cancellations, studio closures, and the company’s general mismanagement, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get excited about announcements for future games.

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The problem with Xbox doesn’t come down to a lack of talent; the company has released several great games just over the last few years. Games like Forza Horizon 5 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle aren’t just drawing in audiences on Xbox platforms, but they’re also finding a lot of success on PS5. Despite all of this, Xbox has managed to create a situation where the future feels up in the air, and there’s not a lot of incentive to get invested in games that might be several years away.

Will These Games Even Come Out?

image courtesy of kojima productions, xbox

Following The Game Awards 2023, it felt like things were really looking up for the Xbox brand. The show saw not one, but two really exciting Xbox-published games announced: Marvel’s Blade and OD. The combination of a new Marvel game from Arkane and a horror title from Hideo Kojima felt like a bold declaration for the future. Unfortunately, Xbox owners have been inundated with negative news in the nearly two years since. Recently, games like Perfect Dark, Everwild, and Contraband have all been cancelled. In the case of Perfect Dark and Everwild, these were two games announced several years ago. By doing so, Xbox is creating a situation where fans don’t know if the company can be trusted to actually put out the games it’s touting.

We’re already seeing the negative impact of these cancellations. Rumors about Marvel’s Blade being cancelled started to circulate immediately after Perfect Dark and Everwild. The game appears to be safe right now, but there’s no telling if that will last. There have also been concerns about the status of OD. The level of negative reaction from the industry would be unfathomable if Xbox were to cancel a horror title from Kojima, especially after the years long controversy Konami has faced after canning Silent Hills. But that doesn’t mean Xbox will resist sticking its foot in that particular bear trap.

Is Management to Blame?

With everything going on, it’s impossible not to see Xbox management as the key problem. Figures like Matt Booty and Phil Spencer can hardly be blamed for the state of Redfall, a game that was in development at Bethesda before the Xbox acquisition, and launched to negative reviews. However, there are plenty of games that can be blamed on the pair. Is Xbox so hands-off that the company doesn’t realize until years into development that games like Everwild aren’t going to make it to market? Rare’s now-cancelled game was apparently in very early development in 2014, was announced in 2019, and cancelled in 2025. That means it took Xbox 11 years to realize it wouldn’t meet the company’s standards. That’s not even addressing the mess of Perfect Dark, which was one of the big showpieces during last summer’s Xbox Games Showcase before being unceremoniously dumped.

The key problem with all of this is that it feels like even the developers behind good games haven’t been safe. Hi-Fi Rush was one of Xbox’s most critically acclaimed games from the last five years. A brand-new IP that got lots of positive attention, and it was developed by a team based in Japan, which is a region where Xbox has historically struggled to find an audience. It seemed like the kind of win the company really needed. Despite all of that, Xbox made the decision to shut down developer Tango Gameworks just over a year later. The studio was saved at the last minute following an acquisition by Krafton, but the entire situation painted a terrible portrait of how things are being decided at Xbox.

Can Xbox Do Anything to Fix This?

Some of Xbox’s problems aren’t just on the company, but on the video game industry as a whole. Events like The Game Awards have become the equivalent of sitting through nothing but the trailers in a movie theater, with the caveat being that the movies are years away and might never come out. Publishers like WB Games will show a snippet of footage revealing a new Wonder Woman game, resulting in tons of positive feedback and excitement. Yet all of that evaporates when the game is cancelled years later.

But just because other publishers do it too, it doesn’t absolve Xbox from the bad situation it’s responsible for. While early announcements can generate a positive news cycle during a drought and build up some hype, cancelling those games years later is decimating Xbox’s reputation. Why get excited for a game that might come out several years in the future from a publisher with a history of cancelling titles? Cancelled games are a reality of the industry, but these cancellations wouldn’t sting so much if Xbox weren’t stringing us all along with the hopes of titles we’ll never actually get to play.