Microsoft’s Xbox has been around since 2001, and over that time the gaming brand has given us huge hits like Halo, Gears of War, Forza, and more. Today, the Xbox brand covers consoles like the Xbox One, PC gaming, and has even expanded to other platforms. You can play Minecraft on everything from a computer to an iPhone to a Nintendo Switch. Along the way, Microsoft has pioneered modern services like Xbox Live and Game Pass, introducing new ways to play games. And with Project Scarlett on the horizon, the Xbox looks to have a bright future.
Ahead of Gears of War: E-Day releasing in October, Microsoft opened preorders for a new $89.99 Xbox controller featuring “3D molded, laser-etched details of cracked asphalt with red, glowing cracks.” On September 30th the Xbox Design Lab will also introduce a new E-Day design with a top case featuring artwork by illustrator Luke Preece.
Xbox and PC gamers in Australia are reportedly being notified that they’ll soon need to verify their age before purchasing 18+ rated apps and games on both the Xbox Store and Microsoft Store. Existing purchases and downloads won’t be affected. Microsoft has a September 9th deadline to comply with Australian online safety rules, or risk facing an almost AUS$50 million fine (about $34.9 million in US monies).
Xbox Insiders will be able to choose if they want game chat and party chat audio in their captures, according to a blog post. Players can individually control if their voice is included in a capture.
The post also includes details about new ways to their sort achievement history, the ability to restore previous versions of cloud saves, and an upgrade to wishlists that now lets you add up to 1,000 games.
Microsoft said Thursday that it’s been rolling the app out “over the past month” to supported TVs running Hisense’s VIDAA OS. The company announced earlier this year that the app was on the way.
The Xbox app is also available on select Samsung TVs, Amazon Fire TV devices, and LG TVs.
The outage, which lasted for nearly a day, blocked people from playing some digital and disc games. You can read Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet’s full explanation on X, but here’s a key part of it:
What happened. Late last night, a licensing service that sits outside of XBOX, but which XBOX depends upon, began failing. This caused some sign-in scenarios to fail, and it caused many scenarios that require an entitlement check to also fail, such as listing out your Full Library and launching games that you own. It also affected several of our publishing and store partners who depend on those same systems which is why some of you saw issues in specific games and not others.
The new remake of Halo: Combat Evolved is out today, and it’s an excellent reimagining of an FPS classic. But it also comes at a very weird time for the Xbox brand and Microsoft’s gaming ambitions. You can check out my full review below.
Ubisoft announced that several of its biggest (and smallest) hits from the past decade are available on the Xbox PC app. Also, those who already own digital console titles listed in the Xbox blog post can play them on PC for no additional cost via the Ubisoft Connect app. Sounds like Ubisoft is positioning itself for Xbox’s PC-like Project Helix.
After a PS5 outage last week, now it’s apparently Xbox’s turn for problems, weeks after a massive wave of layoffs. The Xbox Live status page says an outage was first reported at 11PM last night and is still ongoing, preventing some account sign-ins and stopping people from playing their games, whether from a disc or a digital copy.
On my home Xbox, I could launch many games I own, but trying to load Game Pass titles threw up a “Check back later” message or error code 0x87e107df, indicating the license couldn’t be verified. The last update from @XboxSupport came three hours ago.
[X (formerly Twitter)]
How could anyone have known that LeBron James would choose Philadelphia as his next NBA team? Well, there were signs.
After Microsoft brought four original Xbox games to PC earlier this week, a reverse engineer found that the company is powering them with Xenon Fusion — the same emulator that enabled backward compatibility on the Xbox 360. This might be laying the groundwork for Xbox 360 games on PC, as the XWine1 account on X figured out how to get some 360 titles running with “varying degrees of success.”
The new $149.99 VelocityOne Flightstick II upgrades the original with a new full color screen at the top of the joystick, 38 mappable inputs, and Hall effect sensors. It’s joined by the $149.99 VelocityOne Dual Throttle featuring two levers with adjustable tension, 35 programmable inputs, and an LED throttle indicator.
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Halo: Campaign Evolved is excellent, but it’s launching at a very awkward time.
The OneBGS union said in a post that Bethesda laid off some of its Canadian employees on July 17th, weeks sooner than employees were warned the layoffs would happen, PC Gamer reports. That same day, Bethesda announced it’s working on Fallout 5.
As Microsoft continues its Xbox “reset,” the pared-down Game Pass bundle that arrived recently as a benefit for Discord Nitro is now also included in the 7.99 monthly / $59.99 annually Quest subscription. The starter edition also includes 10 hours of cloud gaming access to try some of the 50-plus games it unlocks before downloading them.
Meta also said that soon its Meta Quest Touch controllers will be able to emulate the Xbox gamepad, although anyone who has a real Xbox pad can just pair that to their headset immediately.
Aftermath wrote about a rally on Wednesday at ZeniMax’s office in Rockville, MD. ZeniMax, which oversees studios like Bethesda, was hit with 379 cuts in the state of Maryland as part of the broader Xbox layoffs.
379 positions were cut in the state, according to a WARN notice obtained by Game Developer’s Chris Kerr. The cuts include major layoffs in Rockville, where the Bethesda Game Studios HQ is located.
Game File reported on the changes as well, including senior leadership departures at Zenimax Online Studios.
Update: Added Game File’s report.
The studio, which was hit hard by this week’s Xbox layoffs, says that it still has “the crew we need to build the games and tech we’re known for.”
On that note, I really recommend that you check out the new Doom expansion that launched this week — it shows just what makes id special.
Game Developer reports the OneBGS union is holding the rally in support of laid off developers on July 15th at ZeniMax offices in Rockville, Austin, Dallas, and Montreal, as the union announced in an email to members:
“Microsoft and ZeniMax leadership have made the devastating decision to slash over 440 positions across BGS, ZOS, id, ZWU(QA) and ZeniMax corporate (including CTO and CSUR). Because we organized and certified our unions, we have hard-won legal rights and protections that non-unionized studios simply do not have. The company wants us to accept this as a done deal and quietly disappear. We won’t let that happen. Our next steps are to mobilize. We need every single member visible and unified.”
The Xbox CEO, who announced mass layoffs at Xbox this week, will assess “the economic impact of new general-purpose technologies, including artificial intelligence, to inform the Federal Reserve’s policy judgments.”
She’ll work alongside Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz, and Charles I. Jones, a Stanford professor who is “on leave” at Anthropic.
[Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System]
That includes “key, high-performing people in the trenches” working on The Elder Scrolls 6, IGN reports. One Bethesda staffer told the publication that the layoffs have had “a crushing effect on morale,” and one said that the QA department was “decimated.”
96 of the layoffs were at the id Software office in Richardson, 40 of the layoffs were for remote workers that reported to that office, and 22 of the layoffs happened at the Bethesda Game Studios office in Austin, according to a WARN notice obtained by Game Developer.
[Game Developer]
I missed this yesterday, reported by Kotaku. The studio will apparently keep working on Grounded 2 and DLC for The Outer Worlds 2, but “plans beyond that are up in the air,” Kotaku says.
The Wall Street Journal reported the number on Monday. Bloomberg corroborated it on Tuesday, adding that the subscribers figure is “4 million fewer than it did when the company last publicly shared data in 2024.” At one point, Microsoft had hoped that the service would have 100 million subscribers by 2030 — it seems unlikely it’ll meet that bar.
