Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke officially announced the update on social media following a meeting with Xbox head Phil Spencer.

“We’ve found a solution that allows us to bring Baldur’s Gate 3 to Xbox players this year still, something we’ve been working towards for quite some time,” Vincke said in the announcement. “All improvements will be there, with split-screen coop on Series X.”

The Xbox Series S console version of the RPG will not feature split-screen coop, a disappointing part of the update, but Baldur’s Gate 3 will have cross-save progression functionality between Steam and Xbox Series consoles.

Stay tuned here or other prominent video game journalists for more information on Baldur’s Gate heading to Xbox in 2023.

The post Xbox Scheduled to Release Baldur’s Gate 3 Later This Year appeared first on Sudairy.

The Xbox Developer Sustainability ToolKit includes resources that include:

• Power Monitor tools
• Certification reports
• Power consumption dashboards
• Best practices

Ubisoft and 343 Industries were named as early users of the Xbox Developer Sustainability ToolKit with 343 Industries able to reduce energy use by 15% without impacting the player experience at all.

Ubisoft and Xbox are co-developing an energy-efficient eco-mode for users.

You can check out the full report right here.

The post Microsoft Unveils Xbox Developer Sustainability Toolkit appeared first on Sudairy.

The Xbox Game Pass subscription business has reported a record number of active players, reporting a record 120 million monthly active users across its gaming ecosystem.

• Revenue: $52.7 billion (up 2% year-on-year)
• Net income: $16.4 billion (down 12%)
• Operating income: $20.4 billion (down 8%)

• More Personal Computing (incl. Xbox) revenue: $14.2 million (down 19%)
• Gaming revenue: Down 13%
• Xbox content and services revenue: Down 12%
• Xbox hardware revenue: Down 13%
• Monthly active users (gaming): 120 million

The company said that a number of the declines were in line with expectations.

The post Xbox Q2 Revenue Dips 13%, Game Pass Continues Growth appeared first on Sudairy.

The project, known as Keystone, as the topic of conversation as Spencer was interviewed on an episode of The Verge’s Decoder podcast.

“The console we built that now people have seen, Keystone, was more expensive than we wanted it to be when we actually built it out with the hardware that we had inside, and we decided to focus that team’s efforts on delivering the smart TV streaming app” Spencer explained.

Microsoft announced a partnership with Samsung earlier this year to bring an Xbox Cloud Gaming app to Samsung’s Smart TVs and Spencer said that the company is “really happy with the results there” thus far.

Spencer added that Xbox is “still focused” on the project but that pricing has proven to be difficult as they try to align it appropriately within the market.

“I don’t want to announce pricing specifically, but I think you’ve got to be $129, $99, like somewhere in there for [Keystone] to make sense in my view, that we just weren’t there,” Spencer said. “We weren’t there with the controller. And I love the effort. The reason it’s on my shelf is the team rolled up their sleeves and in nine months they built that thing. And a bunch of us took it home and it worked. It worked really, really well.”

The post Xbox Explains Decision to Abandon Plans for Keystone Streaming Console appeared first on Sudairy.

Microsoft has a deal in place to buy Activision Blizzard, the publisher behind Call of Duty, for around $69 billion, but the deal has been scrutinized by competitions regulators, including the UKs Competition and Market Authority, with concerns that Microsoft could end up “withholding or degrading” Activision Blizzard works from other consoles or even subscription services.

Ryan spoke out about the offer.

“I hadn’t intended to comment on what I understood to be a private business discussion, but I feel the need to set the record straight because Phil Spencer brought this into the public forum,” Ryan said, according to Gamesindustry.biz.

“Microsoft has only offered for Call of Duty to remain on PlayStation for three years after the current agreement between Activision and Sony ends. After almost 20 years of Call of Duty on PlayStation, their proposal was inadequate on many levels and failed to take account of the impact on our gamers. We want to guarantee PlayStation gamers continue to have the highest quality Call of Duty experience, and Microsoft’s proposal undermines this principle.”

The post Playstation Calls Xbox’s Call of Duty Offer “inadequate on many levels” appeared first on Sudairy.

“I’m so grateful for the work I get to be a part of in service to Team Xbox and our fans,” Greenberg said in a tweet. “Excited for the future ahead too!”

Greenberg began his career as a senior planner for software in Latin America and then moved on to serve in a number of senior roles inside Xbox’s sales and marketing teams.

The post Aaron Greenberg Promoted to VP of Xbox Games Marketing appeared first on Sudairy.

As part of a document sent to Brazil’s Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) to justify its proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the company claimed that Sony actively attempts to “inhibit growth” of Game Pass by trying to prevent content from landing on Game Pass.

“Microsoft’s ability to continue expanding Game Pass has been obstructed by Sony’s desire to inhibit such growth,” the company said in the documents. “Sony pays for ‘blocking rights’ to prevent developers from adding content to Game Pass and other competing subscription services.”

Additionally, Microsoft called Sony’s concern regarding the potential that Call of Duty could become an exclusive Xbox title “incoherent”, pointing to Sony’s own exclusivity strategies related to Playstation.

“It only reveals, once again, a fear about an innovative business model that offers high-quality content at low costs to gamers, threatening a leadership that has been forged from a device-centric and exclusivity-focused strategy over the years,” Microsoft said.

The post Microsoft Accuses Sony of Paying Game Devs to Stay Off Game Pass appeared first on Sudairy.

Things to know about this preview:

• The people you share your membership with do not have to be Insiders but must reside in the same country as you. Enrollment is limited and will remain open while the offer is available.
• Joining the Game Pass – Insider Preview will convert the time remaining on your membership to time in the new plan, based upon the monetary value of the old membership. For example, a full month of Ultimate will be converted to 18 days of membership for this plan. This way you won’t lose any of the remaining value on your existing subscription upon conversion. Conversion is final, and users must wait for their new membership to expire before returning to a previous membership.
• Conversion is not available for invited group members. Before joining a group, a group member can cancel their existing subscription or wait for it to expire. If they do not have a Microsoft account, invited friends and family will have to create a new Microsoft account and sign in with it to participate.
• Members with Xbox All Access won’t be able to participate in this preview.
• In Colombia, parts of the copy for the preview have not been localized and might be displayed in English.

Known issues:

• Invited members with an existing subscription may encounter an error when accepting an invite. We’re working on enabling these members to cancel immediately to accept the invitation.
• Attempts to upgrade twice within 24 hours will be blocked. For example, upgrading from Xbox Live Gold to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate will work, but attempts to then upgrade from Ultimate to Xbox Game Pass – Insider Preview will be blocked for 24 hours. There is currently a generic error code shown when this is attempted.
• Microsoft account family members will not receive an email when automatically added to a group. Primary account holders can share benefits with Microsoft account family members automatically. We’re working on sending a confirmation email, and family members do not need to explicitly accept an invite to get access.
• A Primary account holder may see a “Something went wrong” error when trying to share directly to two or more Microsoft account family members at once after purchase. Please wait a short time and try again. Alternatively, try sharing via email or link.
• Error while trying to purchase Xbox Game Pass – Insider Preview plan. If you’re blocked from purchase with this error code: PEX-CatalogAvailabilityDataNotFound, please report a problem following the steps outlined in the Insider subreddit here. You may be able to work around this by restarting the Microsoft Store and trying to purchase again.
• Subscription sharing “Get help” link on account.microsoft.com links to the support.xbox.com home page instead of a specific support article with sharing help.
• Invitation and group management related emails are currently only in English.  We are working on additional languages for these emails.

The post Ireland, Colombia Xbox Insiders Can Preview New Game Pass Offer appeared first on Sudairy.

“I think we’re probably building more of those now than we’ve been in the history of Xbox,” Spencer said, during an interview with The Guardian.

“We don’t have any direction or mandate that says every game has to be an ongoing, sustained game,” Booty said. “Take Psychonauts: there might be a Psychonauts 3, but I’m not going to tell [designer] Tim Schafer to go make it. Knowing the history of games that he makes, I don’t think he’s going to be making a game that has seasons and goes on for five years.”

Spencer, along with Booty, then discussed their plan to broaden their efforts to find games studios and unique games that are out there.

“Just knowing the talent that’s available, and the tools [such as game engines Unity and Unreal] that are so much more accessible … I would be surprised if in the next three to five years, you don’t see numerous studios in places that aren’t the traditional hubs of video game development.”

The post Xbox’s Phil Spencer Discusses Future of Story Driven Games appeared first on Sudairy.

“This is an exciting day for Xbox. Today we officially complete the acquisition of ZeniMax Media, parent company of Bethesda Softworks” Spencer wrote. “It’s an honor to welcome the eight incredibly talented development studios – Bethesda Game Studios, id Software, ZeniMax Online Studios, Arkane, MachineGames, Tango Gameworks, Alpha Dog, and Roundhouse Studios – and their passionate global communities to the Xbox family. Now that everything is official, we can begin working together to deliver more great games to everyone. At every step building toward this moment, I’ve been inspired and motivated by the creativity, insight, and community-first approach of the talented people at Bethesda. Our goal is to give these teams the best foundation for doing their greatest work and to learn from them as we continue to build Xbox into an inclusive platform for all players.

This is the next step in building an industry-leading first party studios team, a commitment we have to our Xbox community. With the addition of the Bethesda creative teams, gamers should know that Xbox consoles, PC, and Game Pass will be the best place to experience new Bethesda games, including some new titles in the future that will be exclusive to Xbox and PC players.”

Spencer went on to say that Xbox consoles, PC, and Game Pass will be the best place to experience new Bethesda games, including “some new titles in the future that will be exclusive to Xbox and PC players.”

The post Microsoft Says Some New Bethesda Titles Exclusive to Xbox, PC appeared first on Sudairy.

Xbox boss Phil Spector dismissed the idea that games will be “held back” by Microsoft’s development studios’ efforts to create games that are cross-gen between the two consoles.

Spector when on to make the analogy to PC game, saying that you have games that are powerful with the “highest fidelity” which will also “work across a set of hardware.”

“Frankly, held back is a meme that gets created by people who are too caught up in device competition,” Spencer said, during an interview with Gi.biz.

“I just look at Windows. It’s almost certain if the developer is building a Windows version of their game, then the most powerful and highest fidelity version is the PC version. You can even see that with some of our first-party console games going to PC, even from our competitors, that the richest version is the PC version. Yet the PC ecosystem is the most diverse when it comes to hardware, when you think about the CPUs and GPUs from years ago that are there.

“Yes, every developer is going to find a line and say that this is the hardware that I am going to support, but the diversity of hardware choice in PC has not held back the highest fidelity PC games on the market. The highest fidelity PC games rival anything that anybody has ever seen in video games. So this idea that developers don’t know how to build games, or game engines, or ecosystems, that work across a set of hardware… there’s a proof point in PC that shows that’s not the case.”

Spencer also pointed out, when discussing next-gen consoles, that better load times, fidelity, frame-rate, and input latency should be celebrated, but added that you cannot “exclude people from being able to play.”

Spencer said that Microsoft wants it’s customers to play it’s games on any device they wants, adding that players are at the center of the company’s strategy because gaming is “bigger than one device.”

“Our device is not the center of our strategy, our game is not the center of the strategy,” Spencer said. “We want to enable you to play the games you want to play with the friends you want to play with, on any device. On TV, the Xbox console is going to be the best way to play console games. Xbox Series X is the most powerful console out there and it will have absolutely the best versions of our console games. But that’s not to exclude other people from being able to play.

“Gaming is about entertainment and community and diversion and learning new stories and new perspectives, and I find it completely counter to what gaming is about to say that part of that is to lock people away from being able to experience those games” he added.

“Or to force someone to buy my specific device on the day that I want them to go buy it, in order to partake in what gaming is about.”

“Gaming is bigger than any one device, and that is something as an industry that we’ve embraced all up as we bring more and more players in. I think it’s vital to the role that gaming can play on the planet.”

The post Xbox Series X Aren’t Held Back by Cross-Gen Development appeared first on Sudairy.

It’s a good response to current times, with a number of people now forced to work at home due to COVID-19 and associated Stay-at-Home orders and quarantine practices.

“By giving developers access to our PC Content Test App (PC CTA) they can remotely connect to their Xbox Development Kits from their PC, allowing them to test, play and iterate as if they were in the office. It also prevents them from having to download daily builds to local hardware in the home, which can often take hours,” Microsoft stated.

Infinity Ward, Ninja Theory, Playground Games, Rare, Turn 10, Undead Labs and Eidos Montreal are among some of the major studios that have been using this technology since it went live.

“Using the PC Content Test app enables us to bring back our old workflows wholesale. Installs to kits on-site are now minutes rather than the hours it takes to download remotely, and we have the flexibility to react when something goes wrong,” Rare’s technical director Sean Davies said.

The post Microsoft Announces Project xCloud for Developers appeared first on Sudairy.

Check out the following video to take a look at the lineup:

The post Xbox Live Games with Gold January Lineup appeared first on Sudairy.

Check out the video below, hyping the November lineup:

The post Xbox Games with Gold for November appeared first on Sudairy.

Amazon is running the sale from now until May 19th, so you have time to get your hands on the items, some of which are discounted at up to 75%.

Here is the breakdown:

• A Way Out — $20
• Assassin’s Creed Rogue Remastered — $21
• Assassin’s Creed: The Ezio Collection — $20
• Assassin’s Creed Origins — $36
• Assassin’s Creed Origins season pass — $28
• Burnout Paradise Remastered — $30
• Deus Ex: Mankind Divided — $8
• The Disney Afternoon Collection — $8 (
• Doom — $20
• Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen — $20
• EA Sports UFC 3 — $40
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Special Edition — $30
• The Evil Within 2 — $30
• Fallout 4 — $20 (
• For Honor — $20
• Just Cause 3 — $8
• Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2 — $42
• Life is Strange: Before the Storm — $10
• Middle-Earth: Shadow of War — $30
• Monster Hunter World — $45
• NBA 2K18 — $30
• Project Cars 2: Deluxe Edition — $45
• Resident Evil 7 — $22
• Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration — $20
• The Sims 4 — $25
• Star Wars Battlefront II — $24
• Tekken 7 — $30
• Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition — $8
• Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus — $30

The post Xbox One Digital Game Sale Breakdown appeared first on Sudairy.

Microsoft will still be appearing at E3, but all the major stuff will take place across the street from the Los Angeles Convention Center, the site of E3, to the Microsoft Theater in LA Live for what the company is referring to as it’s “biggest E3 showing ever.”

Microsoft’s E3 press conference will kick things off on Sunday, June 10, at 1 PM PT, followed by Xbox FanFest events, hands-on demos for E3 attendees, and much more.

“Not only does the Microsoft Theater allow us to centralize our Xbox presence at E3, but its size enables us to include even more fans and partners in the Xbox E3 2018 Briefing than ever before,” corporate VP Mike Nichols wrote in an Xbox Wire post.

Microsoft won’t be absent entirely from the official E3 show floor as it will have a booth for it’s Mixer streaming service.

“These changes–expanding our presence, multiple venues, taking over the Microsoft Theater–give us the opportunity to bring together a variety of Xbox experiences into one primary location and, most importantly, let fans in on what we’re up to in 2018 and beyond in a fresh new way,” Nichols said.

Speculation is that Halo 6 will be among the major announcements Microsoft will make this year.

The post Microsoft Boasts E3 Plans For Xbox’s “Biggest Showing Ever” appeared first on Sudairy.

Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide, Back to the Future: The Game – 30th Anniversary Edition, are just some of the games that are available. Here are some others:

Xbox One

• Warhammer: End Times – Verminitide (December 1 – December 31)
• Tales From the Borderlands (through December 15)
• Back to the Future: The Game – 30th Anniversary Edition (December 16 – January 15)

Xbox 360

• Child of Eden (December 1 – December 15)
• Marlow Briggs and the Mask of Death (December 16 – December 31)

Mega Man Legacy Collection and Mega Man Legacy Collection 2, Caveman Warriors, Bridge Constructor, and Poi are some of the games on sale now.

The post December 2017 Free Xbox Games With Gold appeared first on Sudairy.

IGN reports that the original Xbox compatibility function, along with 13 original Xbox games , will be available on Tuesday.

Here are the games coming to the marketplace tomorrow.

• Black
• BloodRayne 2
• Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge
• Dead to Rights
• Ninja Gaiden Black
• Fuzion Frenzy
• Grabbed by the Ghoulies
• The King of Fighters Neowave
• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
• Psychonauts
• Red Faction 2
• Sid Meier’s Pirates!
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

A number of these titles are available to purchase in the Xbox marketplace as of right now, priced at $9.99 each.

“A curated list of key games was the way to go with this,” Xbox’s Bill Stillwell told IGN about which games will be made available.

“The predictable combination of missing contracts and music licensing, exacerbated by defunct publishers, is to blame according to Stillwell.

It’s unclear if Xbox One X will have this functionality or not.

The post Original Xbox Compatibility, 13 Games, Coming To Xbox One Tomorrow appeared first on Sudairy.

Months later and now we have an update on when that compatibility can be expected to be rolled out.

Xbox boss Phil Spencer, who spoke to GameSpot at the Brazil Game Show, had plenty to say in regards to an update.

“We’re close, we’re really close,” Spencer said. “I have a little dashboard I go to and I can see all the games [and] where they are in getting approvals in the pipeline. I know the games that are coming for the original Xbox but I don’t think we’ve announced them all. We have to do this in partnership with partners, but we’re still on track. I feel really good. The games look great.”

Spencer also remains confident that the feature will be out before the end of the year, as planned. “Oh yeah,” he said about his certainty of a 2017 launch. He also teased that there are still details about backwards compatibility will work on Xbox One X that have yet to be revealed: “There’s some stuff we’re going to talk about in that space in terms of how compatibility’s going to work on [Xbox One] X specifically that I think people will find pretty interesting.

“Some of the games hold up really well; some of them don’t. But the gameplay mechanics and the smile [you got] on your face 15 years ago playing those games, those are things that are still there. I see it, like getting back to playing Crimson Skies, [it’s] fantastic, and the game actually looks really good even though it’s obviously been around.”

The post Xbox One’s Original Xbox Backwards Compatibility Update appeared first on Sudairy.

The trailer showcased historical figures Ptolemy and Cleopatra, to fans delight.

The game is set to hit shelves on October 27, 2017 on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

The post Assassin’s Creed Origins Trailer Revealed At Gamescom 2017 appeared first on Sudairy.

The latest trailer will have you even more excited about the game and it may even give you some added motivation to check out the BETA in early October.

Featuring places such as Endor, Fondor, and Ryloth and a first look at the Starfighter Assault mode as well as the Millennium Falcon, this trailer will give you plenty to ‘ooo’ and ‘ahh’ about.

Not to mention, Yoda, who also voices a pretty good monologue, manning a laser turret looks pretty damn epic.

The post Star Wars Battlefront 2 Trailer Shows Off Space Battle appeared first on Sudairy.