Xbox showcase beats PS5 once again but Microsoft is avoiding the real issues

Xbox wins not-E3 again (Microsoft)

GameCentral offers a round-up of the big announcements from the Xbox Games Showcase and how what it didn’t talk about was as important as what it did.

The not-E3 period of summer showcases is meant to be a time of excitement and surprise but that’s not really how things have worked out this year, even though a number of very promising new games were shown.

Once again, the PlayStation State of Play was devastatingly uninteresting, with only two first party games, while Sumer Game Fest was fine but had no real scene stealers. And, just like last year, the Xbox Games Showcase was by far and away the most impressive of the three (Nintendo has a Direct planned for June but there’s no date yet).

This time, Sony at least had the promising looking Astro Bot, but if anything Xbox’s showcase was even better than last year, even if the other constant from 2023 is that everything of note had leaked out well ahead of time.

Doom: The Dark Ages and Gears Of War 6 were the big reveals but those had been rumoured for weeks, with the name of the former leaking out ahead of time but not the latter – which is actually called Gears Of War: E-Day and seems to be a prequel starring a young Marcus Fenix.

The majority of games were shown as either pre-rendered trailers or in the ambiguous middle ground where they’re using in-game assets but clearly aren’t gameplay. The Indiana Jones segment, for example, was very impressive but the majority of it was clearly a cut scene where you, as the player, aren’t doing anything – unless the game is secretly filled QTEs.

That’s just how modern previews are though, as Microsoft managed to make the likes of State Of Decay 3 and Starfield DLC Shattered Space look very impressive, despite both franchises being renowned for their jank and unimpressive graphics.

Put really, in terms of this style of old school preview event, Xbox got everything right. Which is significant because they never used to be very good at them. Although it’s ironic that just as they get the formula right PlayStation has stopped competing.

The showcase worked because it was a good mix of first party and third party games, with the likes of South Of Midnight, with its unusual stop motion style cut scenes, going cheek-to-cheek with Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Metal Gear Solid Delta (which still didn’t get a release date).

Fable got a new trailer, with more gameplay in it than last time and a 2025 confirmation, but arguably the most interesting first party reveal was Perfect Dark, which got a fairly extensive gameplay demo.

Despite the original being the spiritual successor to GoldenEye 007, there was very little shooting in the new game, which instead played up the gadget-using super spy angle – which is probably a good idea.

Non-exclusive Life Is Strange: Double Exposure was a nice surprise too, even if the voiceover had to point out that the protagonist was Max Caulfield, despite it neither looking or sounding like her (and she has a new superpower). The light/dark world parallel timeline gimmick sounded interesting though and it’s out on October 29.

The only first party disappointment was Obsidian’s Avowed, which still doesn’t have a release date – even though it’s out this year – and which looked considerably lower budget than even most of the third party games. That doesn’t mean it’s not good, but it was also shoved away towards the end of the showcase and it’s beginning to feel very much like Microsoft is trying to ignore it.

Last year, Microsoft ended their showcase with a 30 minute look at Starfield which, while impressive at the time, quickly backfired when it turned out the actual game was far less impressive. This time the focus was on Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6, which is much more of a known quantity. That means it was an intrinsically less exciting reveal but also that it had a better guarantee of the final product living up to the hype.

All three Xbox execs did put in brief appearances, but Xbox boss Phil Spencer merely introduced the event and Xbox president Sarah Bond made only a short announcement about the all-digital Xbox Series X – while faintly hinting about next gen hardware.

The whole showcase was an undoubted success for Xbox but in part because it avoided any of the difficult issues. The fact that all the games looked good is an achievement not to be downplayed but Microsoft made no mention of the current state of the industry or their multiformat plans.

Amusingly, they repeated the old Sony trick of not listing all the formats for multiformat games, so it looked like all of them were Xbox console exclusives. This included one of their own first party titles, in Doom: The Dark Ages, which didn’t list the PlayStation 5 at the end of the trailer when it was part of the showcase but quietly added it in when the trailer was released separately.

The concept of multiformat releases was not mentioned once by any exec and while rumours continue to swirl about their plans, it’s still unclear whether Microsoft is keeping things secret or if they genuinely don’t know what they’re going to do and are still playing things by ear.

Clearly they wanted the Xbox to appear as competent and desirable as purpose, as they laid out their roadmap for this year and next, but the only time anyone came close to discussing the 10,000 job losses of the last 12 months – including the recent closures of Microsoft studios Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin – was an asinine comment from Head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty, who blandly stated that: ‘The creativity and talent of game developers are what make our industry unique.’

He didn’t have to say that but he did, despite Microsoft having laid off more than most, with over 1,900 developers losing their jobs this year. The industry is in crisis and yet Xbox was doing its best to pretend that everything was business as usual.

There may actually be some merit in that, as it was certainly far more inspiring than PlayStation’s depressingly threadbare equivalent, but at some point soon Microsoft is going to have to explain their plan for getting out of the current mess of rising development costs and declining console sales. But that time was clearly not at the Xbox Games Showcase.

That’s not entirely accurate (Microsoft)

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