Talking Point: If You Were Releasing A Game, Which Month Of The Year Would You Pick?

We've already talked quite a lot recently about Xbox's stacked first-party lineup for 2026 and how they'll need to work around the release of GTA 6 in November along the way, and we've seen plenty of discussion from the Pure Xbox community about which months you'd personally choose to release a game in.

It's an interesting topic to ponder in general, especially considering the sheer number of releases these days and how it's so easy to get overlooked amidst a sea of high-quality launches. Get the timing wrong, and your game could end up severely struggling for sales regardless of impressive it might be.

There's also the question of whether you build a marketing campaign in the months ahead of launch, or go for the increasingly common "shadow drop" - launching a title out of nowhere like Oblivion Remastered and Hi-Fi RUSH.

It's no surprise that many publishers continue to target the busy October and November periods for their major releases ahead of the holidays, but if you look at the top-rated Xbox games of 2025 according to Metacritic, many of them went much earlier this year — Monster Hunter Wilds in February, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 in February, Split Fiction in March, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 in April, Blue Prince in April... the list goes on.

Xbox obviously has multiple major games to schedule in 2026, so we'll likely see a mix of dates ranging from early in the year to somewhere around November, but even if you take GTA out of the equation, there's still a difficult balancing act to ensure you stand out while also setting up your game for the best chances of monetary success.

So, let's have a discussion about this! If you were releasing a game and you knew it was ready to go at some point over the next twelve months, which month would you pick ideally? We'd love to hear from you in the comments.