Microsoft events to showcase a new slate of games – including Starfield

Today Microsoft announce An upcoming live stream called “Developer_Direct” which will include a look at several upcoming games from the company’s many development studios.

Set for Jan. 25 at 3 p.m. ET, the company promises glimpses in Redfallthe latest game from insulting And victim Developer Arkane – which traces its roots back to influential PC classics such as system shock And Ultima Underworld. It will also include profiles of games from other studios, including Minecraft LegendsAnd Forza MotorsportAnd The elder scrolls online.

Notably absent from that list is the game most people would probably want to see: starfieldScience fiction epic from Sheikh’s manuscripts And Drops Developer: Bethesda Game Studios. If that’s your interest, don’t worry — Microsoft has announced it, too starfield He will be getting a standalone event to “deep dive” in the near future.

starfield It’s expected to release sometime in the first half of this year, but we haven’t seen much of it since last summer, save for a couple of short, mostly light-detailed videos on the game’s YouTube channel.

For games premiering on January 25th, Microsoft says there will be “several minutes of gameplay” from the game Redfalla vampire-themed first-person shooter that seems to combine elements of far cry Serial and cooperative shooter left 4 Dead game, among other things. “Fans can expect to learn more about combat, customization, bosses, the open world, and more,” says the Microsoft blog post.

Promise “toys” to Minecraft Legends And Forza Motorsport. finally, The Elder Scrolls OnlineTamriel’s annual update cycle will continue with new details on the “2023 Main Chapter Refresh” and “the newest areas of Tamriel to become playable.”

For years, the gaming industry has been dominated by a handful of press conferences around the summer’s E3 event. But companies like Nintendo have recently refocused on studio-shot online video streams throughout the year, allowing games to be shown at a cadence that better fits those games’ development cycles. In the past, whether the timing made sense or not, studios often wasted many man-hours preparing June’s E3 demos, resulting in wasted development time, long man hours, and sometimes unrepresentative demos.

Microsoft has typically stuck to an E3-like cadence, even though competitors Nintendo and Sony have moved to an intermittent live-streaming model dubbed the “live” strategy. This event seems to be one of Microsoft’s most important moves in the new direction.

The timing makes sense. Microsoft was a studio and publisher Shopping fun over the past few years, and now has an unrivaled number of storied studios and intellectual properties under its wing, including Bethesda, Arkane, Obsidian, Rare, and many more – including all Activision Blizzard Studiosthe should The proposed mega-acquisition passes.

These acquisitions come after many years when Microsoft lagged behind its competitors in terms of in-house exclusive content for its gaming platforms.

There’s one last bit of additional relevant context, too: Microsoft has been fully working on a Netflix-like subscription model with Game Pass, bundling an ever-changing library of first- and third-party titles (some exclusive, some not) into subscription packages for Xbox consoles and PC. Windows.

Most, if not all, of the games featured in the upcoming Developer_Direct broadcast will likely be included in Game Pass.