Blessing Adioye Jr.

I'm pulling from Don Pepia at Eurogamer.

The Game Awards has only just wrapped, but we've already got another vague date in our calendars, January 2026.

Per an interview with Microsoft's president of game content and studios, Matt Booty, in Variety, Xbox will be hosting one of its dev direct streams in January.

Quote,

I can't share exactly what's there, but we've got a lot of stuff that we're shipping next year, he told the site.

In fact, usually Dev Direct is about highlighting what's coming up for the year ahead.

This year, we've got more stuff coming up than we can fit in one show.

So I'll tell you that Playground Games is going to be in the Dev Direct

We'll have more stuff next year to ship than we can fit into one dev direct show in January, which is a good place to be, end quote.

For clarity, that means we can probably expect updates on the upcoming Fable game and the Forza Horizon series, and perhaps a couple of updates from other games that come under the Xbox Game Studios umbrella.

This comes after we saw very little from Xbox at the Game Awards proper, whilst PlayStation made an appearance with a number of games being worked on by PlayStation Studios.

Phantom Blade Zero, Marble Token, and Housemarque Sorrows all have some form of PlayStation relationship.

That means there'll be console exclusives.

We did see a new trailer for Diablo and the shadow drop of a new class for the game, the Paladin.

But besides that, it's been a pretty quiet night for the company.

and that's my thing is I didn't bring this up during the predictions I probably should have spoke up because I could have got points or something but like I didn't expect Xbox here I think they put themselves in a weird place having their dev directs in January we know that they're every January now and we know that they really come out and talk about the big news the big details like those big bullet points happen at that dev underscore direct now obviously would it be more exciting for game awards yes would you get more eyes at game awards yes all that stuff but like I feel like it's a weird

It's a weird beat to manage around, right?

With that dev direct.

Like, I guess I wouldn't even know, like, for you, if you're Xbox, Mike, how do you navigate that?

What are you saying at Game Awards and following up with that dev?