The Hottest Game Releases Coming This Summer

[Music] All right, I'm just keep rolling. Yeah. Yeah, it's all you. I mean, you loaded this up before our event, so I was a little bit busy. So, thank you. These are the easiest things to cover, right? Because these are the big events of the summer, right? So, we have the Xbox showcase. We have Summer GameFest from Jeff Keelley. So, we're just going to run through these as quickly as possible and give my quick takes, but the Xbox showcase was profoundly disappointing to most for a variety of reasons. Although, it was actually a decent show. The some of the highs were Persona 4 remake was really cool. They did do a tease on Black Ops 7, which we'll get to in a minute. Outer Worlds 2, which is coming out soon, and a bunch of other games came out, third party that look really good. And so, it was primarily a third party type event. new DLC for Indiana Jones and then the teasers for first party were disappointing, right? So, Fable, Forza, Gears of War, right? And so, yeah, I

mean, it's good for them to have something there, but clearly they're not ready for prime time to show at these showcases, which seems odd because they're coming out freaking next year. You know what I mean? It So, that was a little bit of a miss. Do you think it's because like so old school remember we had to branch a build and do a whole build to get ready for E3 or these big moments? Do you think it's like the team's like you know f you and I don't want to do that anymore so they don't have the content to show? That is very likely. I mean this is the whole issue with E3 just in general was that it takes people's attention away from actually making the game. Yeah. And so they don't want to dedicate the resources to create the best trailer or some gameplay demo. But generally they do have these type of you know vertical slices where people are playing through like new games to get people hyped and excited and just one of those games would have actually probably helped a lot right like Gears of War. I mean oh I love that IP Fable has been in development for a long

time. That was supposedly out re going to be last year right? So yeah just having a playthrough on the Fable and what it looks like would have just sealed it. I remember that got delayed like it got a lot of [ __ ] I think because some of the character I forgot what it was but it got [ __ ] on so I think they had to rework it. I hate to be called cynical but shocking my cynical self is like these guys are not executing at all on first party like they are so mismanaged right now that there's just no way they can execute against these releases because they have way too many considerations going on with what's going on at Microsoft and you know their position there. And I'm going to do a piece on LinkedIn about this that is not going to go over well I'm sure. Like what did Phil Spencer miss on? Right. So they bought all their means of production. Like they brought Halo in house. They brought Gears of War in House. They grew these marquee franchises that were third party and then they bought the means of production and then when they owned that asset, they proceeded to destroy it. And I'm just I'm not quite sure like

what Phil Spencer could have done better in the production process. like he set up a whole studio ecosystem around Halo. Like he tried to throw capital at it. He tried to do the same for years. I just don't where did he go wrong? I mean I think this whole subscription thing has been a distraction, right? I think their whole strategy has been distraction to what matters most is making great games for a platform that are exclusive that get people to buy your freaking platform, right? I mean that basically fundamentally, right? They should just spin out Xbox and let it compete independently. Get rid of subscription, all that stuff because I think that will get them focused on what matters most is building out the studio or actually executing against these projects because they do have some good IP, right? But they just Was that a good P&L if it gets spliced out on its own? Well, they're going to have to be forced to get get back on track, shaved and wait like Yeah, it ain't it's not going to be easy, right? But it's better now than it is in 5 years when this thing is going

to be a death of a thousand cuts and there's going to be nothing left, right, of you know, all this whole org. So anyway, all right, moving on. All right. Yeah. So, the biggest challenge Oh, and then also they announced the stupid hardware thing, the Rogue Ally, which did get a lot of press. I look, I'm not suggesting that it didn't get great press, but this is just a remake of of an ASUS handheld, right? It's and it's going to be like 6700, $800, right? It's it is a non-event in gaming. doesn't mean anything really. Um, yeah, I want to [ __ ] on the trailer. So, Phil and Crest, like we've done skew management, right? Yeah. Please help me understand why on earth you launched two versions of a handheld that isn't even unique that Oh, it has Xbox buttons. It's a modified ROG Ally. And you know, this is like an incredibly small market already. I think there's only been like four or five million units of the Steam Deck sold. You know, this PC less, right? So, this PC to Xbox

to cloud gaming system, you have two SKs that are going to be super expensive. Like what? What? Explain it to me. Anyone? Anyone? Because I can't explain this as somebody who shipped physical product to a store. Like that is just insane. Yeah, it's super heavy. I mean, it's it's hardly portable almost. It's just so niche. It's so niche. And the fact that they didn't release price is indication of that the price is going to be insane, right? Yeah. It's going to be super high. So, the trailer, listen, they did the best they could with what the what it was. But what I didn't what I thought was misleading is in the beginning of the trailer they give you this impression that this thing is like new that it's being sculpted from this translucent you know translucent I guess liquid assid is the official term. Yes. Yes. So um Xbox is also adopting liquid ass and so it gives you this impression that this thing is like kind of uniquely sculpted and developed for the Xbox and

it's not at all. It's a device that has new buttons and you know so a lot of the USPs and the messaging in this are such that I don't think it's going to help sell this thing. I think this is going to be a super challenge. If I were to have done this I would have done one skew try to make it you know affordable. You know right now we think this is going to be more expensive than the unit itself which what Xbox Series X sells at 600 bucks now. I forgot where we are cuz they jacked up the price for tariffs, right? And the Switch 2 is 500 bucks or 450. It's like, yeah, Switch 2 is is 450 by itself, 500 with Mario Kart 8. All right, so go back to your [ __ ] on the rest of this. Here's my take. Microsoft has really lost its way, right? like First Party is not delivering at all in 2025 and they have promises for 2026, but who knows if any of these games are coming out in 26 because we have no information or details about these games at all. Not to

mention GTA is coming out in 2026. Why would you want to compete with GTA? You know, like all your efforts should be getting G people to play GTA on your platform at this point, right? There's a huge problem here. Again, the handheld looks really cool. It's but super niche. It's going to be super expensive. Probably 600 800 somewhere around there. It's that's not material. It's an engagement driver for the core. It's not like something that's going to expand the audience. But the biggest thing that actually I'm really really scared about, right? And we don't know yet for sure, but the Call of Duty thing was really really scary for me, right? Because at the end of the day, they only gave a teaser to Call of Duty at this show, right? And Call of Duty is coming out in a few months, okay? And so like generally we would have so much information and teasers and like dev diaries and all the [ __ ] about what's going on with Call of Duty, but they didn't do that, right? And they haven't done that. And so the reveal was very, very disappointing for the fans. And so speaking to Variety, this guy Tyler Ball explained what the company was trying to

do with this announcement on Black Ops. He said, "Usually at this point in time, we have teased everything that's coming out. And I think in a lot of ways we're setting this up more like a Beyonce album dropping. Nobody's going to know about it and nobody's going to see it coming. It's like, what the [ __ ] is happening? Okay, why are we doing a Beyonce drop for Call of Duty? Call of Duty is the biggest game in the world. Every year for the last 15 years, we don't do freaking Beyonce drops. Okay? And the fact that he's bringing up Beyonce is beyond me right now. Right now, he clarified. So he clarified. So I when I first read this I was so insensed but he clarified though that this is just for the announcement that they are using the Beyonce drop. Okay. But at the end of the day they're going to do more typical marketing campaign for Call of Duty for the rest. But what worries me about this is that either the team is not ready to deliver the type of content that we need to do the marketing

messages that they typically do, which is scary, right? Because the execution is not there, which has been there for the last decade, right? Or two, they don't have the budget anymore, or they're pulling budget or trying to save money because they're losing their ass on this stupid subscription. They're pulling budget from the marketing machine that is Call of Duty. And for the first time ever, they actually have competition this year, right? They have Battlefield coming out, right? And so it's I worry I I'm worried I'm worried that they're not going to execute against this. And the fact that they're iterating on Call of Duty Black Ops is actually kind of a good thing, but it's also a little bit scary that they don't have another game coming, right? They're not doing the different thing. Anyway, I'm worried. I'm worried about where Microsoft is going and this is all very very scary and bad bad juju and bad signs. So anyway, that's my take on this. I mean, but I'm confused because the second part of his quote you have here is the whole goal was to really do something different for us to zag and show up in a unique way. And one point

in doing that is almost not doing any pre-promotion and giving it to players in a really unex so is was it the trailer or is it the game he's talking about Eric so there's this thing I was reading Michael B. Jordan, you may know him as the lead actor in Sinners. He was referring to something that I think Denzel Washington said. He says, "You don't want to be overexposed." You know, you don't want to give yourself away for free when you charge for it on the weekends. Call of Duty has just been overexposed, Eric. You don't understand. You don't understand what's coming. It's going to be shock value. They're overexposed. Battlefield's edging in. Uh, buckle in. Well, shadow drop. Taylor did it first. The Taylor Swift test shadow drop. Dude, [ __ ] that. Oops. F. Oh, yes. Got it. Got the money in the jar. Jen, to your point though, yeah, this was the really scary thing. We are doing no prima promotion. We're going to give it to the player. You don't need to give it to the players

in unexpected way. This is a juggernaut. This has been the top game forever. You don't need to do it differently, right? There's no feels like a cover up to something that they have no control over which is likely budgets or development timelines. Right. This is what it feels like to me because this guy T I don't know who Tyler Ball is but like he's a tail wagon dog. Smaller brother PR guy who's just trying to like save himself because he got a lot of flack for this [ __ ] dude. Yeah. I Yeah, I'm confused by this, you know, from a marketing standpoint. I'm confused what he's what he's actually talking about. Well, he clarified that he was t again talking about the announcement, not necessarily the marketing campaign. So, we still have the ability he still has the ability to redeem himself if he actually can get the marketing campaign back on track, right? And make it the big event that Call of Duty is, right? And has I mean, I'm all for thinking about and reimagining how you market the biggest game in the world. I don't know. I'm trying to watch the trailer because I missed it. It doesn't even look like a trailer. It looks like somebody a robot

giving a tour of something. But see, but Beyonce dropped a product and Apex dropped a product. The comparison is GTA who surprise dropped their trailer which was a marketing asset. So the comparison doesn't make sense to me because you right. Oh, anyway. All right, we can move on. I don't understand. Over overexposed. All right, moving on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. [Music]