It feels quite apt that Xbox has really started to nail this summer showcase business these past few years. Those few years being right when the summer showcase as a concept is starting to look just a little out of date. Back in the heady E3 days, team green used to pack out their LA Live Microsoft theatre, just along from the main show floor, and then frequently go on to, most of the time, sort of biff it. In the post E3 years that moved to the slightly smaller-still-swanky Grammy Museum, as Xbox stubbornly refused to give up an inch of ground in a fight that had, actually, really ended quite a long time ago. Sony and Nintendo had long since moved to doing everything via some version of pre-recorded direct. And now this year, when it feels like it’s finally cracked the summer game showcase formula for good, finally listened and learned and done all of that good stuff, it also clocked on that it might be time to follow its peers in sagely ducking out of the in-person wrestlefest at last.
I thought the Xbox showcase this year was quite good, as it has been honestly for the past couple of years as well. This one in particular was a show that felt packed-out in a different, more modern kind of way, forgoing megabudget bombast and distant vapourware, as genuinely fun as they can be, for a selection of curios and upper-mid-sized ventures. The kind we all keep saying these folks should really be making more of.
The result is a sense of Xbox leading a kind of new-wave games industry charge. It would’ve made for a pretty good on-stage show, really. They could’ve made a few quips about games that’ll actually ship, or games that don’t get pulled from storefronts a week after launch. And it’s especially stage-worth with an actual, physical prop to wave around in the handheld Xbox Ally X. Imagine Don Mattrick hoisting that big ol’ thing aloft triumphantly in front of an audience of whoopers and hollerers, before inevitably finding some new way to trip up over his own feet. Magic.
Instead all the best corpo-cringe was saved for quiet, back room briefings away from the public eye – namely the one, incredibly long, three-part promotional video that members of the press were treated to at the end of their Ally X hands-ons. (Much more on that handheld to come from us, but do feel free to treat yourself to the longest 11 minutes of your life by watching that promo if you like – you’ve been warned!)
Back to the showcases, anyway, and Xbox’s impeccable, finely tuned rhythm and sense of variety contrasted pretty starkly, I felt, with the Summer Game Fest Opening Showcase’s carnival of grot. Watch the SGF showcase alone – which I expect some people may well do, given its major prominence at the heart of all “summer of gaming” exhibitions – and you’d be forgiven for thinking video games were having some kind of existential teenage regression.
We opened with a grim fantasy knight doing a truly incredible amount of graphic shanking, in a game I’ve been reliably told is not actually called Stab Man, per Tom Orry in our live feed, but Mortal Shell 2. And then we followed that with (a few bright, palate cleansing sorbets aside) a lot of games that did broadly give off that same sort of vibe. A lot of dark fantasy action RPG soulslikes. A lot of knights. Quite a lot of egregious cuts to heaving cleavage or women in various states of undress, I couldn’t help but notice actually. What was the deal with that? And, blimey, a lot of horror.
It was around the time big Geoff read out the next back-of-the-box selling point, “featuring visceral dismemberment!”, that I started to clock we might be onto a bit of a trend here. This was a gnarly, grey-green dorm room of a showcase, not helped by a vague sense of reactionary populism that seemed to linger in the air. There was the weirdly snarky interlude from the head of Splitgate 2 developer 1047 games, Ian Proulx, who strode out in a custom “Dark MAGA” style hat reading MAKE FPS GREAT AGAIN and threw a few tired jibes at the shooter establishment. A grim framing to this is that while Proulx and his specific choice of hat were on stage glibly lobbing heaters at Activision and EA in a spot of cheap-laugh “remember the good old days” marketing, around the corner Los Angeles locals found themselves tear gassed and shot at with less lethal munitions, in a frantic, escalating standoff with ICE agents attempting to deport their fellow Angelinos.
Adding to that was also a hefty amount of definitely-not-Russian studio Mundfish, makers of Atomic Heart, who stayed on theme by dutifully trotting out their signature thrusting sexbots in not one but three different “Atomic Universe” games. Despite best attempts – check out their “Atomic Heart – 6-hour Twins Scene” April Fools video on YouTube for more! – the award for most ludicrously sexualised character this year must go to The First Descendant: Breakthrough. The title of that one I’m assuming refers to the heaving, disembodied pair of breasts it so artfully featured reluctantly boobing themselves bustily into a skin-tight catsuit in that trailer’s opening closeup. Hell yeah!
Despite my snark here, obviously things aren’t quite as simply delineated as I’m making out. There were rays of genuine, often literal sunshine amongst the diseased gloom of the SGF show. Sonic Racing CrossWorlds looks genuinely rad. I’m quite keen on that Lego game about solving puzzles with a mate, and the other Lego game that’s basically Mario Party. And Mixtape! And honestly, Splitgate 2 looked like just my cup of tea until Hat Bro came out and made his entire development team’s life infinitely harder right as their game goes to launch. Likewise, I am actually very partial to dark fantasy action RPG soulslikes with knights and visceral dismemberment.
The real point with SGF is that the sheer volume of soulslikes and disgusting glob bosses and rancid zombie babies would’ve felt less samey if they’d just been spread out a little better. Or, ironically given Keighley’s opening speech about the importance of game discovery, if they were presented with just a bit more of a sense of real curation. The reality of course is that this just isn’t really what Summer Game Fest is for. It’s a paid access thing, which is fine and helpful for at least some developers in a way, but also a system that leads to a bit of self-selecting. You get a lot of very similar games because a lot of very similar types of developer and publisher see this as the best way to market them. And because there are a million other showcases now too, from Xbox and Sony to wholesome games, women-led games, 40-plus retro indie JRPG games! After all those there’s only so many left. (All that said: credit where due to whoever decided to follow the Wuchang game with the Wu-Tang game. Inspired.)
Nevertheless, SGF this year felt like the least representative showcase for video games of the lot. Even the Day of the Devs pairing that followed it played into that, as a kind of direct mirror to the experience, all joy and light and ingenuity, diversity of every kind. With PlayStation’s show slightly earlier and more confined and Nintendo off doing Nintendo things, instead it really does feel like Xbox, actually, is perhaps the show the gaming-curious world needs to watch if they had to pick only one. It was the broadest and most well-balanced, across genres and tones. It was probably the one with the most invention and variety across its games, with musical home-renos and walking lighthouses mixing with fighting games, Call of Duties and MMOs. And crucially it was probably the one with the most significance for the industry, with a new range of handheld Xboxes – manufactured in this case by Asus ROG – set to arrive later this year. If nothing else, Xbox is always good for a bit of chat about a bold new vision.
The unspoken point behind all this, of course, is that the real reason Xbox’s show feels like the real main event for showing off new games these days is that ultimately, Xbox just owns an awful lot of game developers. It’s taken a while to get here, and it feels deeply cruel to go from “Xbox doesn’t have enough games” straight to “Xbox has too many games” but, well, it kind of does. It is wonderful for the brand, which has taken a kicking and maybe deserves a bit of a break. And it’s no doubt great for people in the company’s ecosystem, be that on a console or your smart fridge or whatever else it’s touting as an Xbox these days. A Game Pass subscription is fast becoming a no-brainer in an ever more expensive hobby (and an ever more expensive world).
But there is also, obviously, a catch. Great as it is for Microsoft, it’s not so great when so much of an industry – never mind a creative industry – is owned by a single, gigantic corporation. It leaves video games dangerously exposed to a single CEOs whims, for starters. Which as we’ve seen with, for example, this continued push for unrestrained AI everything – did you know the Xbox Ally X comes with Copilot AI? You do if you’re a shareholder, or if you watched that blasted video! – those whims aren’t always the best.
And, likewise, just as we’ve seen too with the continued layoffs at Microsoft, which have gone on now for years and which many are directly or indirectly a result of consolidated jobs from the likes of Activision, Blizzard and Bethesda. Not to mention Microsoft’s involvement in selling AI software to Israel’s military – a point which may induce a severe tonal whiplash here, I’m keenly aware, but which does remain relevant. Microsoft has acknowledged it – though also claims there’s “no evidence” it’s been used to “target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza” – while a call to boycott Xbox products specifically continues.
As much of a sudden gear-shift this topic may be, this is exactly the point: as ownership over the creation of games becomes increasingly concentrated amongst a few vast companies at the top, as entire hobbies are sucked into their orbits, such calls become tougher and tougher asks. The whole “vote with your wallet” thing does rely on you having more than one thing to vote for.
I’m very aware of being a downer here, at a time reserved for dutiful celebration – a ghost at the gaming Christmas feast! – and yet this stuff is just increasingly hard to avoid. Xbox has had, everything else aside, several very good years of showcases at this point. It is ultimately doing it right with what it showed off this weekend, in diversifying, making more sensibly-sized bets, and letting Obsidian do nice Obsidian things – or at least pointedly presenting itself that way.
At the same time, those great showcases have aligned rather nicely with Xbox buying an awful lot of game developers. And sour as it may feel to constantly bring up, games are deeply entangled with the wider world. It’s just the nature of it – as our fella with the hat accidentally reminded us so effectively at the weekend. And it became quite hard to ignore as those growing protests here in downtown LA made their way right past the old Microsoft Theater, arms raised, flags in the air. It makes me sincerely happy to see an increasingly healthy and sensible approach from Xbox. It’s a fun twist to see it suddenly find itself at the heart of gaming’s conversation at last. And I also can’t help but wonder what this kind of oligopoly over a medium might eventually come to mean.
