Last week's Xbox Developer Direct set up Microsoft's gaming division for a stacked 2026, particularly with the long-awaited Fable revival set to land this fall. Obviously, the gaming industry has an 800-pound autumn gorilla lurking in the form of GTA 6's November launch, but Xbox Game Studios head Craig Duncan isn't overly concerned about what Rockstar's planning.
"I mean, it's more that they're going to do what they're going to do," Duncan says when asked about GTA 6's impact on Xbox's release plans in an exclusive interview with GamesRadar+. "My job is to do what we should do for the best of our games. So yeah, we don't… there's always other games, and there's always other things we have to consider."
I doubt Xbox is entirely sticking its head in the sand when it comes to GTA 6 – I wouldn't expect Gears of War: E-Day to launch on November 19, for example – and certainly, every indication suggests that it'd be a bad idea for any game to release up against Rockstar's open-world epic. But Duncan suggests that it's just one factor among many in setting a release date.
"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," Duncan tells us. "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."
It'd be easy to miss given the discourse around Microsoft these days, but Xbox released a ton of games in 2025. Avowed, South of Midnight, Keeper, Ninja Gaiden 4, and The Outer Worlds 2 all came out alongside an array of ports and remasters, and that's not even counting the titles launched under the Activision Blizzard and Bethesda banners. Three of those games even came out just a few weeks apart from each other in October.
"There are very few windows and there's more and more games, and more competition for a player's time," Duncan says. "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."
