Det er sværere end nogensinde før at fange publikums opmærksomhed i dag, især i spilbranchen. Udgivelserne står i kø, og tempoet er så højt, at det kan være svært bare at gennemføre et eller to spil på et år, for slet ikke at tale om at følge med hele kalenderen. Det er noget, som Xbox Game Studios-chef Craig Duncan er fuldt ud bevidst om. Efter 2025, hvor store annonceringer og store Xbox-udgivelser til tider kom til at spænde ben for hinanden, vil han nu ændre strategien i 2026.
"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. 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," fortæller han i et interview med GamesRadar+. "There are very few windows and there's more and more games, and more competition for a player's time. 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."
Duncan ønsker også større klarhed omkring, hvilke spil der udkommer dag ét på PlayStation 5. For nylig undrede det nogle fans, at Forza Horizon 6 ikke lanceres på PS5 fra start, mens Fable gør, selvom spillene er udviklet af samme studie.
"There's always development realities about when these projects start - how big a team is, and what plans we have at the start of development. Like you said, when a strategy changes, maybe you've got a plan that exists with a game and maybe you can adopt that, maybe you can't. So that's why. And to be clear, this is totally fair feedback. Sometimes we are inconsistent. You see some games in one place, some games in multiple places. Just know that we're going to work on that, and we're going to try and be more consistent with what we do," forklarer Duncan. "But you know, for our game makers, if you're on the Fable team you just want as many people who love Fable to appreciate the great work that the team's doing. That's always our goal. It's rarely more complicated than that. It's like, how can we get this game to as many players as we can?"