It's tougher than ever to grab an audience's attention nowadays, especially in the gaming world. Releases come so thick and fast that it's difficult to beat one or two games fully in a given year, let alone power through the entire calendar. This is something Xbox Game Studios head Craig Duncan is all too aware of. After 2025, when big announcements and big releases from Xbox stepped a bit on each other's toes, he's looking to change strategies in 2026.
"I think that we ideally want to space things out and make sure games have their own, as we like to call it, oxygen in those moments. It's just super busy. Our own release schedule is one thing, but then you have everyone else's release schedule at the same time," he told GamesRadar+ in a recent interview. "There are very few windows and there's more and more games, and more competition for a player's time. There's also movies, music, and all this other stuff as well that gets packed in. So the learning was this: let's not put stuff on top of our stuff, and I think we have done that. Let our games have a bit of oxygen, even though it's always busy and there's never really a free time to launch something."
Duncan also wants there to be better clarity with which games are coming day one to PlayStation 5. Recently, it seemed odd to some fans that Forza Horizon 6 would not launch on PS5 straight away, but Fable would despite them being made by the same developer.
"There's always development realities about when these projects start - how big a team is, and what plans we have at the start of development. Like you said, when a strategy changes, maybe you've got a plan that exists with a game and maybe you can adopt that, maybe you can't. So that's why. And to be clear, this is totally fair feedback. Sometimes we are inconsistent. You see some games in one place, some games in multiple places. Just know that we're going to work on that, and we're going to try and be more consistent with what we do," Duncan explained. "But you know, for our game makers, if you're on the Fable team you just want as many people who love Fable to appreciate the great work that the team's doing. That's always our goal. It's rarely more complicated than that. It's like, how can we get this game to as many players as we can?"