Xbox Game Studios: All Microsoft First-Party Developers & What They're Working On

I love this article and wish PureXbox would do this article a little more frequently and or fined a way to pin it at the top and update it periodically

One things for sure the coalition need to get this gears of war game right I don't like how the series has under them so far gears 4 was good gears 5 was a huge let down campaign wise and no original trilogy remake for us fans up to this point is disgraceful!

thanks very useful!

Can you expand this list to include 2nd party studios and partner projects?

Toys for Bob announced a joint project with Xbox Studios for their next game

@Boogaloo_Jenkins definitely an option! For now we just wanted to bring all first party studios into one article to keep track of everything going on at Xbox.
Maybe we'll look into expanding it or doing a separate article - but it's a little harder to track some of these 2nd party projects.

Glad to see that PX now has their own Studio Coverage page that PS has.

Activision stuff aside, everything being worked on by Xbox game studios looks awesome. It's been a slog of a wait, but the chickens are finally coming home to roost

Best article I've read in a while. Very helpful!

@Coletrain I would disagree.

There are only a few things coming up that I’m interested in, and that’s not a slight against the studios. They’re mostly very talented teams that have delivered many solid titles in the past. It’s simply that for whatever reason, a lot of these upcoming games don’t look very appealing.

Clockwork looks like a poor man’s Bioshock, Raven’s talents are being squandered on CoD, Everwild looks bland (and when I say ‘looks’ I’m speaking metaphorically since they basically haven’t shown anything at all), Avowed looks like trash (sorry but that hideous visual aesthetic murders any desire I would have had to even boot it up), and I’m genuinely concerned for Elder Scrolls 6 after how badly Bethesda butchered Starfield and that lame dlc.

Other stuff I never had any interest in marches ever onward; stuff like CoD, Minecraft, Blizzard mmo’s and King’s mobile slop.

On the positive side, Fable holds extreme promise if the footage we’ve seen is even remotely accurate, and plenty of other studios are known safe bets like ID, Machine games, Turn 10 and Playground games. So it’s a mixed bag for the future, whatever ‘games aren’t important, services and welding totalitarian control over what we let you play and how we choose to distribute it’ future that turns out to be thanks to Darth Satya’s vision for his Empire.

Gotta say, only recently learned about South of Midnight, but man that game looks good. Probably my most anticipated game on here tbh (with the potential exception of FH6 if that's in the works).

I'm interested in Gears and Avowed.

That's two more games than my interest in Sony's exclusives.

I wish I had more interest in their first party studios.

Can’t complain too much tho, because I do really like some of them, like obsidian and inxile and doublefine.

But many, I just don’t care.

@Balaam_ I find almost every game intriguing but I will agree with you on elder scrolls 6, I want to like it but I don’t think anyone at Bethesda knows how to take constructive criticism and releasing probably around the Witcher 4 will not be good

@Balaam_ well at least you're potentially looking forward to one game 🤣

Pretty much everything on there is in genres that I really enjoy. Some of the studios are a little untested, so south of midnight and clockwork revolution could end up being total duds, but I still find their concepts interesting. And avowed looks like the best RPG obsidian have ever put out, but then I really like fantasy RPGs

I also believe they can have a good 4-5 big games a year now. For 2026 we should get state of decay 3, perfect dark, gears, and of course another cod

@Prestige-worldwide I think ES6 will sell gangbusters astronomical amounts of copies even if launched alongside Witcher 4 or COD 8. It's one of those evergreen franchises for massive sales.

@Prestige-worldwide I hope they throw in some de-makes of their games & give some smaller studios the chance to create indie hits from spinoffs of their franchises. Something to keep us occupied between big releases. I'd still love a Metroidvania style game with the Master Chief, 343 uses a lot of lore and short stories nobody reads on their website so a 16-32 bit game that is text heavy between action platforming segments would be great.

@Kilamanjaro I don’t think sales are ever the question I just think that Bethesda is up to industry standard. I will certainly play it but I’m not sure if it’s a game I’ll be able to go back to over and over like Skyrim

@Kilamanjaro I like a lot of what obsidian is doing, with grounded and pentiment. They said they want to make 7 games in 7 years so we’d be getting a good amount of smaller AA games from them

That's a lot of studios working on a lot of games. Add the third-party partnerships, third-party games and it's safe to say that I'll be very well fed on Xbox for the foreseeable future 😀.

Always hurts to see raven and treyarch in the coal mines.

Just waiting on TES6 although I need an alternate to Nexus.

This is a great, informative and interesting article, @Kezelpaso. Respect! Would be good to see this reappear (and hopefully updated!) perhaps quarterly...

This is such a useful article, credit to the author/team, thanks!

I enjoy these lists. Crazy that there is also support studios like High Moon and Beenox not mentioned on top of all that.

Also i’m pretty sure Wolfenstein III was confirmed (however this was from 6 years ago…)https://variety.com/2018/gaming/news/bethesda-wolfenstein-iii-still-single-player-1202942199/

The Initiative - Perfect Dark

@Prestige-worldwide always a fan of more in the pipeline. I'm a big fan of games made quickly that focus on fun & simplicity. A 4-8 hour experience is a sweet spot for me for those indie type games.

Seriously! This article is amazing. Really helpful.
I wish Nintendo Life and pushsquare will follow 😋

This should be pinned at the top. This is really helpfull.

@Benjamin Updated and added this now, our bad! I think I had Crystal Dynamics in my mind for this one, who of course aren't a first-party team.
It'd be interesting to know which team is doing the heavy lifting with PD.

Rare's output since becoming an Xbox studio has been absolutely shocking. What is going on over there? Their NES, SNES, Game Boy and N64 games were classic after classic over the course of whole generations.

@The-Chosen-one Actually, Push Square has already been doing this for this for years now… I think they started it in 2018 and they update it periodically.

@__jamiie you can play all of their previous games with Rare Replay. And as someone with a significant amount of the extremely rare achievements from the collection. Their own games don't hold up. You can also see why, with a team of talented developers willing to fulfil multiple roles, as is documented within the collection. How they churned out a significant variety of games in the late 80s and early 90s. The had a professional pipeline with decent and well rounded staff. Arguably the best port team in the business.

Their home computer output was great, varied, even novel at times. But I don't think any of them play particularly well once you peel back the curtain. They feel slap dash, lacking the polish of big studios at the time. The games are usually superficially deep with ridiculous peaks in difficulty.

The End of the Snes era and throughout the N64 era, was better. However N64 owners have rose tinted spectacles.

Even their lauded games such as Goldeneye (1997) quickly became overshadowed when Medal of Honour and Unreal Tournament (1999) launched. It looked generations behind in comparison. The recent rerelease hype died faster than a May fly. It's obviously a classic but has aged badly.

This also applies to almost every other franchise they worked on. Once Xbox bought them they released Grabbed by the ghoulies, Kameo and Perfect Dark Zero which all underperformed and let's be honest, all suck.

Viva Pinata was so leftfield it continually dodged anyone's radar. With that series of games Kinect sports duty followed and they did as well as expected.

They attempted to bring back Battletoads and Killer Instinct but their own IP is weak. Better scrolling beat em ups and one v one fighters existed even then.

So that is why. A prolific port team and platform game specialist with a disciplined payroll were bought to develop their own IP, which have all failed. They still have the minerals to make games. But without the big IP, such as James Bond or Donkey Kong their cozy design philosophy and wafer thin game mechanics struggle to carry a new protagonist or concept. Their once ground breaking cgi in-game graphics and arcade boards have been eclipsed, replaced by industry wide game engines and standardised controls.

Sea of Thieves was actually the best game they could have done after all that. Maybe it's been too long, they really needed a big IP to shine.