What to Expect From Xbox in 2025

Microsoft’s first-party output continues to be highly inconsistent. Cast your mind back to 2022, a year that saw the Xbox Game Studios umbrella release next to nothing the entire year, with Pentiment being the only notable first-party Microsoft release to speak of. The following year, things were certainly better in terms of pure quantity, but each major release still came with caveats- Hi-Fi Rush was incredible, but Microsoft shut down its developer, before selling it to Krafton. Starfield has its fans, but its easily Bethesda’s most divisive RPG yet. Forza Motorsport was not without its strengths, but it, too, divided opinion. Redfall, meanwhile, was just a straight up disaster.

2024, meanwhile, was much less eventful, both for better and for worse. One one hand, we had no major failures like Redfall, but other than the unquestionably excellent Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, the only other unequivocal win we can attribute to Xbox for the year is an expansion, Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred. The rest – from Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 to Starfield to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 – were arguable all just different shades of underwhelming. And yet even after what’s been an endless stream of ups and downs, 2025 is looking like quite a promising year for Xbox.

Mind you, we’re talking specifically about the publisher’s release schedule for the year here, because looking at everything that Microsoft has lined up for release over the coming dozen months, one can’t help but be impressed (or preemptively impressed, at the very least). Kicking things off is Avowed, Obsidian Entertainment’s long-awaited fantasy RPG, which, after some delays, is now looking increasingly promising as it approaches its release in February. Interestingly enough, it’s not the only major RPG coming from Obsidian this year either, because as we learned at The Game Awards in December, The Outer Worlds 2 is also due out in 2025.

Oh, and speaking of major new first-party Xbox RPGs, Fable is also primed for 2025. Announced what feels like ages ago, in the years since then, we haven’t seen an awful lot of Fable, but excitement surrounding the Playground Games-developed reboot has been constantly high. Suffice to say, it’s easily going to be one of the year’s biggest releases (provided it doesn’t get hit with a delay). Then there’s South of Midnight, Compulsion Games’ action-adventure game, which will take players to a stylized and fantastical Deep South-inspired setting that’s looking consistently promising in its showings. And of course, we can’t forget DOOM: The Dark Ages, with the masters at id Software looking to go medieval with their beloved first-person shooter series.

And that’s just what we officially know about so far. Journalist Tom Warren recently suggested that the company had more games scheduled to release in 2025 besides what’s been officially confirmed for the year so far. As for what that could be referring to? Previously, Warren had claimed that Gears of War: E-Day was tentatively targeting a 2025 release– if the shooter does indeed release this year, it would be  massive boost for Xbox. More recent leaks, meanwhile, have claimed that a remake of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion is set to be announced soon, with a release following in 2025 itself. For fans who have been starved for more Elder Scrolls in the prolonged absence of a new mainline release, an Oblivion remaster could be huge.

Luckily enough for all of us, it won’t be too long before we have further clarity on that front. For the last couple of years, Microsoft has kicked the year off with a Developer Direct presentation in the month of January, and leaks insist that the same will be the case in 2025 as well. Supposedly, a third consecutive January Developer Direct showcase is on the horizon, where we’ll not only be seeing more of games that have been previously announced, but also get new looks at entirely new announcements. If that show does indeed happen – and we’d be surprised if it didn’t, given how Microsoft has gone about things the last couple of years – it’s likely that the Xbox release schedule for 2025 will be looking even more packed in the next couple of days than it already does.

There is, of course, one major caveat that’s worth noting with a number of Xbox releases. 2024 was the year that saw the company fully adopting the multiplatform third-party publisher route, with the likes of Sea of Thieves and Hi-Fi Rush coming to the PS5, and Pentiment and Grounded to both PS5 and the Nintendo Switch. Many, of course, would argue that the writing had been on the wall for Microsoft heading down that road for a while now, but at the same time, there’s also a case to be made that that decision presented the beginning of the end of Xbox as a console platform. That doesn’t mean Xbox is going to exit the market, obviously – with Activision Blizzard King now under its ownership, Microsoft Gaming is making more money than ever (contrary to what the eye-watering layoffs in 2024 may have led you to believe) – but it does mean that we’re going to be looking at pretty much every Xbox release going forward a lot differently.

This spring will see Indiana Jones and the Great Circle coming to PS5, hot on the heels of its Xbox and PC release in December, while the aforementioned DOOM: The Dark Ages and The Outer Worlds 2 are both going to be multiplatform releases that will be hitting PS5 on the day of their launch. And we’d wager that that won’t be the extent of it. Time and again over the last year or so, reports have insisted that Microsoft isn’t looking at any game as off-limits in terms of expanding its reach on PlayStation – whether that’s Halo or Gears or what have you – and Microsoft itself has only added more weight to that notion with its public statements. All indications are, then, that 2025 will see the company’s multiplatform plans picking up momentum.

What that will look like beyond the three aforementioned officially announced multiplatform releases is anyone’s guess, though one would imagine that there will be plenty of releases from recent years that could end up on PS5 this year. Might we perhaps expect to see the likes of Forza Horizon 5 and Starfield on Sony’s console? We can, at the very least, assume that the inevitable next Call of Duty game is going to be a multiplatform game (it’s legally bound to be, in fact). Meanwhile, beyond that, Microsoft’s support for Nintendo is also going to be interesting to analyze, especially with the Switch 2 set to release at some point in 2025. Will the next-gen Nintendo system’s lineup be adorned with major Xbox titles before the end of the year? We’d be shocked if it wasn’t.

How Microsoft hopes to stall the aggressive backsliding of Xbox hardware sales in 2025 is anyone’s guess – in fact, some may even wonder if the company is even trying anymore, with its focus clearly having shifted away from hardware – but as far as game releases are concerned, thankfully, there’s plenty to look forward to. Admittedly, there have been times in the last few years where we’ve entered a year with that exact same mindset, only to end up being disappointed by the final result. Now, to see if Xbox can buck that trend in 2025.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.