"We'll have more stuff next year" After being somewhat absent from The Game Awards, Xbox boss teases a Dev Direct for January 2026

The Game Awards has only just wrapped, but already we've already got another (vague) date in our calendars: January 2026. Per an interview with Microsoft’s president of game content and studios, Matt Booty, in Variety, Xbox will be hosting one of its Dev Direct streams in January.

"I can't share exactly what's there, but we've got a lot of stuff that we're shipping next year," he told the site. "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

"So I will tell you that Playground 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."

For clarity, that means we can probably expect updates on the upcoming Fable game and the Forza Horizon series, and perhaps a couple of updates from other games that come under the Xbox Game Studios umbrella.

This comes after we saw very little from Xbox at The Game Awards proper (you can catch up on all the announcements here), whilst PlayStation made an appearance with a number of games being worked on by PlayStation Studios. Phantom Blade Zero, Marvel Tokon, and Housemarque's Saros all have some form of PlayStation relationship that means they'll be console exclusives.

We did see a new trailer for Diablo, and the shadowdrop of a new class for the game (the Paladin). But besides that, it's been a pretty quiet night for the company. At least South of Midnight won an award in the Games for Impact category, though.

Microsoft is having a hard time of it, lately. Between a series of baffling adverts, growing mistrust and disillusionment with its execs, and price increases for Game Pass, there is a lot of wariness around the brand. It doesn't help that there is a growing call from the BDS movement to boycott the gaming platform due to parent company Microsoft's reported complicity in Israeli war crimes against the Palestinian population and state.

Overall, the picture for Xbox right now looks pretty rough. As a new year looms, I imagine the folks in charge of the gaming arm of the Microsoft empire are keen to get the gaming audience back on-side.