Microsoft’s Xbox is heading into The Game Awards Thursday with 10 nominations and major promotional plans for the second season of its “Fallout” TV series on Amazon. The company also had some big news to break as it approaches its 25th anniversary in 2026.
“It’s a good button on the end of the year for us,” Matt Booty, Microsoft’s president of game content and studios, told Variety in an interview last week tied to tonight’s big event at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. “This year for us has been about delivering on the promise of roadmap, frequency of titles, delivering on consistency, delivering on quality. And it’s just great for The Game Awards, as a celebration of the industry overall, but the 10 nominations [for Microsoft titles] is a good button on what has been a year of focus for us. And as you know, the results of the last 12 months were put in motion, two, three, four years ago. So it’s great for the teams to see that recognition and to be able to land such a great year.”
The Game Awards is a unique beast in the awards circuit in that, unlike the Emmys, Oscars, Tonys and Grammys — the paragons of achievement in their respective entertainment industries — the Game Awards isn’t just a three-hour show honoring the top video game titles over the past year. It’s an event packed with announcements of new games, release date reveals and epic trailer launches.
And while Microsoft Gaming has some planned for tonight, including Variety‘s exclusive pre-TGA reveal that Xbox exclusive and 2025 Game Award nominee “South of Midnight” will be launching on PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch next spring, Booty says Xbox Game Studios has so much coming down the pipeline in 2026 that a good chunk of news will be held back until Xbox’s Dev Direct presentation in January. And even then, that won’t cover it all.
“I can’t share exactly what’s there, but we’ve got a lot of stuff that we’re shipping next year. In fact, usually Dev Direct is about highlighting what’s coming up for the year ahead. This year, we’ve got more stuff coming up than we can fit in one show,” Booty said. “So I will tell you that Playground Games [the developer behind the “Fable” and “Forza Horizon 6″ games] is going to be in the Dev Direct, but we’ll have more stuff next year to ship than we can fit into one Dev Direct show in January, which is a good place to be.”
Along with the new “Fable” and the next “Forza,” Microsoft Gaming chief Phil Spencer has previously teased 2026 will include the debuts of “Gears of War: E-Day” and “Halo: Campaign Evolved,” marking the first time that “Halo” will be available on PlayStation devices.
“For us, it’s really going to be a great year. It’s going to be the 25th anniversary of Xbox,” Booty said. “We’re coming up on franchises of ours that have got these decade-level anniversaries. It’s the 40th anniversary of Bethesda, Blizzard’s 35, ‘Diablo’ shipped 30 years ago. We’ve announced things like the ‘Halo Remastered’ collection that we’ve got coming, and we’ve got a lot of other things that we’ll talk about soon, that ship next year. So it’s going to be a real banner year for the brand and a banner year for some of our biggest franchises to show up across the industry.”
Looking back on 2025, the year is wrapping up with a softer-than-usual launch for one of Microsoft’s biggest IPs “Call of Duty,” with the October release of “Black Ops 7.” Earlier this week, Xbox revealed plans to shift its “CoD” strategy to avoid launching back-to-back installments of games in the same franchise, as “Black Ops 7” came just one year after “Black Ops 6” without a break for an installment from a different line of “CoD” games.
Still, “Black Ops 7” was the top game on Xbox’s subscription Game Pass service in November and is the top franchise on the platform for total players and hours played all year.
“Right now, it is one of the most-played games on Xbox. And I’m really proud of what the team did, in terms of feature innovation, moving the franchise forward,” Booty said of the “Call of Duty: Black Ops 7” performance thus far. “Shipping a major franchise like clockwork every year is a really difficult task, and I’m really proud of what the team did to move the franchise forward in that way. And the interesting thing about ‘Call of Duty’ is, I think that as an IP, it is really well positioned to continue to deliver content for players going forward; the system of seasons. And it’s not just about the launch, but it’s kind of in its own unique category and ability in terms of how the team keeps delivering content throughout the year. So we’re real happy with where we’ve landed with that.”
Back in September, Microsoft announced plans for the first-ever “Call of Duty” movie, which will be written by “Yellowstone” chief Taylor Sheridan and produced by David Ellison’s Paramount. Booty explained how that project came from Activision’s trust that the Skydance-owned company had a vision for a “CoD” movie they’d never heard before.
“A relationship came about between the folks at Paramount and the senior people on the ‘Call of Duty’ team, where they felt like they found a partner who understands the game, people who play the game, and shared a vision of what it could be to bring that forward,” Booty said. “And that’s how these things come about for us. They aren’t negotiated at a detached, kind of abstract level — and then we find out. These things start with the game team.”
Booty doesn’t have specifics on the “Call of Duty” movie’s storyline yet, but says Sheridan is a “good match” for what the development team expects out of the project.
Laurel McConnell/Microsoft
Laurel McConnell/Microsoft
“If you think about the way that he tells stories, you think about the other things that he’s been a writer on, I think that the team feels that he’s got a good approach to characters and a good approach to story that’ll match up with their vision of what a ‘Call of Duty’ movie [is],” Booty said. “I mean, it’s an interesting thing. It’s a little bit like ‘Fallout,’ right? We sit here and ‘Fallout’ Season 2 is coming up. Where do you start with making something about ‘Fallout’? Lucky are we that we are shepherds of such a broad canvas of characters and stories, but where do you start? ‘Call of Duty,’ there’s two decades of ‘Call of Duty’ — where do you start? Which character do you pick from which branch of the franchise? And so the team has got a vision where they want to go, and I think Taylor Sheridan will be a good match for what they’ve got in mind.”
Also on the adaptation side, Microsoft is currently in production on the sequel to “A Minecraft Movie” with Warner Bros., which is set for a July 2027 release, and working on a “Gears of War” live-action movie and animated series at Netflix. All of these transmedia opportunities come as the larger entertainment industry is taking note on the value of games, with Electronic Arts’ recently announced $55 billion go-private deal being a key indicator of where priorities lie for investors. (Microsoft made its own M&A move with the purchase of Activision Blizzard for roughly $75 billion in 2023.)
“Games have really become a foundational part of entertainment,” Booty said. “And as such, I think we’re seeing these valuations and transactions that really reflect their place in modern entertainment. And what the collective value of somebody like Electronic Arts, with decades of franchises — speaking of things like Madden and Football Club and The Sims and all the work that they’ve done — I think it just reflects the value that exists in all of that gaming IP. And what its value is, I’m certainly not an M&A expert, but I would look at the value of the transaction really being about the forward-looking value of the IP and the stories and what they’ve created, even more so than necessarily, the static or rearward-looking value.”
The conversation of value trickles down to the consumer level with the question of increased prices for AAA titles. Over the past year, Microsoft has experimented with the cost of its top releases, first announcing a $80 price tag for “The Outer Worlds 2” and then rolling that back to the standard $69.99 upon fan backlash. Booty says the company is still evaluating its approach to pricing in the future.
“Our whole focus is on delivering player satisfaction and delivering player value. And we’re always going to be listening to what people want there,” Booty said. “We’ve reacted in the last year and I think for us, the real focus is going to be — I’ll come back to the phrase meeting people where they are. I think there’s going to be less of a focus on what’s that top line price of a game, as people start to engage in different ways with games. From our point of view, monetization just happens in so many different ways right now. So we’re going to continue to listen to the feedback from fans. We’re going to continue, to balance that with needing to run the healthy business. But right now, on the content side, we don’t have any pricing updates.”
One of Xbox’s biggest growth areas heading into the new year is its continued push to get more of its exclusive titles to PlayStation and Nintendo consoles. From the recent release of “Flight Simulator 2024” on PS5 to the big announcement of the upcoming “Halo” launch on the platform, Booty is optimistic about what these availability options mean for the business.
“We had a bit of a moment earlier in the summer from end of April to end of June, where we had six of the top 10 games on PlayStation were our Xbox games,” Booty said. “I look at that as validation for the teams, but most importantly, it’s an opportunity for more players to engage with our content, to come into our worlds.”
Booty continued: “The coolest thing about the ‘Halo’ announcement was, I was in downtown Seattle, and that weekend is when we do the ‘Halo’ championship series, the esports series, and we had demos of the remastered version on the show floor there. But being there during that announcement and seeing the reaction for that is like the core of the ‘Halo’ community right there. If you’re at that convention center on that day, you are a ‘Halo’ superfan. And it was a lot of excitement there. So again, from the point of view of bringing more people into our content, making our content more accessible, with more fans, we’ve been really pleased with the results.”
