Latest news with #TheOuterWorlds2
Yahoo
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Xbox's big summer showcase is set for June 8 at 1PM ET
There's a big Xbox showcase event scheduled June 8 at 1PM ET. This is happening the same weekend as Summer Game Fest, which begins on June 6. Xbox has typically held these kinds of live presentations alongside Summer Game Fest ever since E3 was sent to a farm upstate to live with other discontinued industry conferences. We don't know what will be shown at the annual Xbox Games Showcase. The company says it will bring us a "look at upcoming titles from across our first-party studios, in addition to incredible new titles from our third-party partners." It's a digital-only event, so there will be no crowd to hoot and holler at reveals. As a guess, I'd expect some new info on that new Fable entry, which was recently delayed until 2026. We could also get new trailers for the Perfect Dark reboot and Ninja Gaiden 4. Other possibilities include Gears of War: E-Day and Hideo Kojima's OD. The sky truly is the limit. Xbox owns a lot of studios and, of course, has numerous partnerships with third-party devs. One game that won't be at the official presser is The Outer Worlds 2. That's because it's getting its very own livestream that follows the showcase. This game was originally teased all the way back in 2021, so it's high time for a release date. Xbox promises a look inside developer Obsidian and trailers that reveal "new gameplay, details and developer insights." Interestingly, The Outer Worlds 2 is no longer an Xbox exclusive, as it's also coming to PS5.
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Obsidian Has Quietly Become Xbox's Secret Weapon
In 2022, Obsidian Entertainment was the only first-party Xbox studio to ship a new game, Pentiment. And in 2025, the Microsoft-owned studio has already launched one big RPG, Avowed, and is set to release a second one, The Outer Worlds 2, later in the year. If it wasn't clear before, it is now: Obsidian has quietly become one of Xbox's most important and valuable studios. Let's flash back to E3 2018. During Microsoft's big showcase that year, Xbox boss Phil Spencer announced that the company had purchased four different independent game studios: Playground Games, Ninja Theory, Compulsion Games, and Undead Labs. Spencer also confirmed a new studio called The Initiative had been created which, we would later learn, was charged with rebooting Perfect Dark. Later in 2018, Xbox announced it was buying two more studios: InXile and Obsidian. Finally, in 2019, Xbox bought Double Fine. After the Xbox maker's studio shopping spree, it had a massive stable of in-house developers. Flash forward to today, almost seven years later, and while all of those studios still remain, they haven't released that much. Here's where they stand as of February 2025: The Initiative - Has yet to release a game. Working on Perfect Dark. Double Fine — Last game released: Psychonauts 2 (2021) - Production began before Xbox acquisition. Compulsion Games - Last game released: We Happy Few (2018) - Production began before Xbox acquisition. South of Midnight is coming this year. Undead Labs - Last game released: State of Decay 2 (2018) - Published by Xbox Studios. InXile Entertainment - Last game released: Frostpoint VR (2020) - A VR shooter that barely lasted four months. Not published by Xbox. Playground Games - Last game released: Forza Horizon 5 (2021) - Published by Xbox. Fable reboot set for this year. Ninja Theory - Last game released: Hellblade 2 (2024) - Also released Bleeding Edge in 2020 under Xbox. Obsidian Entertainment - Last game released: Avowed (2025) - Set to launch Outer Worlds 2 this year. Previously, under Xbox, launched Grounded in 2020 and Pentiment in 2022. It's clear, when looking at that list above, that Obsidian is the outlier. Most of the studios Xbox bought or created around 2018 have only shipped maybe one game, and some of those were in development before the Xbox deal. Other studios, like Compulsion, are finally releasing something after seven years of Xbox ownership. And if you look at other Xbox studios, things aren't much better. The Coalition hasn't launched a new Gears game since Gears 5 in 2019 and Rare hasn't made a new game since 2020's Battletoads. (Though the studio does a lot of support on Sea of Thieves.) Meanwhile, Obsidian has shipped three games since 2018 under Xbox and has another big RPG landing later this year. And it released Outer Worlds in 2019, a game which started production before the Xbox deal and wasn't published by Microsoft, but was yet one more big RPG from the company in a relatively short span of time. And there are rumors of the company already working on a new project, too. So how did the studio reach this point? Well, during a talk at DICE Summit earlier this week, Obsidian Entertainment VP of operations Marcus Morgan and VP of development Justin Britch talked about the company's philosophy of staying lean and making smart investments in medium-sized games that don't take a decade to make. The studio heads also emphasized keeping headcount low and aiming for as little turnover as possible to help the studio gain more institutional knowledge. The goal: The duo want Obsidian to last 100 years. Really. When asked about the goal of keeping the studio around for 100 years, long after they are dead, they said: 'Are we serious? … Yes.' And honestly, I think Obsidian can pull it off. It clearly has a team of people who understand how to build properly scoped games using relatively small teams while managing multiple projects at once. In an industry where some studios lay people off all the time and spend five to seven years working on one game, Obsidian has gone a different path. And the end result is one of the most productive and successful studios around. I bet Microsoft is happy they snagged the place up back in 2018. . For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
