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In This Edition
– We here from Xbox
– Digital Foundry on the ROG Xbox Ally
– Opening Night Live reaction
Hello! I am at Gamescom this week, playing stuff, chatting to people, and doing a lot of interviews (probably too many). We also did a live show all about video game marketing, which you will be able to watch next week. It’s been busy.
Anyway, this week’s Show features two guest hosts. We open by discussing the announcements from Gamescom Opening Night Live. I recorded this with Eurogamer’s Alex Donaldson at the Xbox booth, and you can watch our take on the reveals above.
I then went hands-on and spoke to the team responsible for the ROG Xbox Ally handhelds that are coming out in October. You can read about the session below, and I invited Digital Foundry chief Richard Leadbetter onto the Show to hear his thoughts on the device (and the man was as articulate and insightful as we’ve come to expect).
This is one of those rare episodes where the Show above complements the words below. If you’re in the mood to do a bit of reading and listening, I recommend it.
Enjoy!
Xbox wants to reach a broader audience with its upcoming handhelds, but it might take a bit of time to achieve it.
That’s the view of Jason Beaumont and Jason Ronald, two of the Xbox architects working on the ROG Xbox Ally and the ROG Xbox Ally X, which are the new handhelds the firm is developing with tech manufacturer Asus.
The two devices were on display at Gamescom this week, and The Game Business got hands-on with them and heard from the team about the new features and concepts going into them.
The ROG Xbox Ally X is the one we spent most of our time with, and we checked out Gears of War Remastered, Doom: The Dark Ages and Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 on it. The device is clearly impressive, and it felt great to play, however, it lacked the simplicity and ‘plug and play’ nature of something like Nintendo Switch. These upcoming devices are far closer to traditional PC handhelds, including the ones Asus has built in the past.
But Beaumont told us that the goal is to appeal to existing PC and Xbox players, and to attract a wider audience into the Xbox ecosystem.
He highlighted there was around 20 million German gamers that are interested in handhelds (which was date shared by German trade body game). And “the only way to get to that market is to make investments into making it simple, so you don’t have to understand what a TVP is.” He added that his job is to simplify and reduce down those hardcore PC concepts in-order to bring in new players.
“We view success as both [reaching existing and new players]. They’re both extremely hard to do, but that reducing of concepts is going to be the longer journey.”
“We view success as both [reaching existing and new players]. They’re both extremely hard to do”
Beaumont says that Xbox has been focusing on “better together”, in that the handhelds works best if you’ve already got a library of games on Windows PC. And Jason Ronald says it’s important to offer the features that hardcore PC players expect.
“For all those people who are maybe less technically sophisticated, or don’t love tweaking all their settings and optimising the performance… we want to make sure they have a great experience,” he said. “But we don’t want to stop the people who love that part of it of being able to access that. It is an interesting design challenge trying to find that balance. This is an area that I fully expect we’ll get feedback from the community saying ‘hey, this is still too complicated.’ Or ‘Hey, I still need to be able to get access to that.’
“A great example is Asus has implemented Command Center into the Game Bar, so it is instantly accessible, it works over any game. So, for that power user that actually cares about frame rate performance and TVP and what not, that is directly integrated into there. But you don’t have to do it if you don’t want.”
Beaumont says that the “easy, lazy way” of solving the issue would have been to direct PC players that want the advanced experience towards the desktop. But the team has taken the more challenging route of simplifying the concepts and making them more appropriate for the form factor.
After going hands-on at Gamescom, I am not convinced the team is there just yet. Digital Foundry boss and co-founder Richard Leadbetter joined us on The Game Business Show this week (you can hear our conversation above) and he agreed, pointing out that the games don’t automatically run at the best settings on the devices, and require some tweaking for the optimal experience.
Yet Xbox talked about this being a longer journey and discussed a road map of features and additions it is looking to make beyond launch. Leadbetter believes this is really just the first step for Xbox, which has never worked with a hardware partner like this before, and we should expect improvements and changes once the machines are released.
“We have seen Xbox on PC, but this is an Xbox PC,” Leadbetter said. “I find this quite interesting, because it is going to need work. It is going to need time. But what you also need is a first generation product to actually work with. And that is what I think this is.”
Speaking of which, both ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X will reach retail shelves on October 16, alongside an array of accessories and add-on products.
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As expected, PlayStation has raised the prices of PS5 hardware in the US. All three models: The All-Digital edition, the Standard console and the PS5 Pro, have increased in price by $50. The news follows similar increases for Xbox and the original Nintendo Switch. The console hardware sector has been impacted by tariffs imposed on China by the US Government.
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Game development veteran Rod Fergusson has returned to the BioShock franchise to lead the studio Cloud Chamber. The developer has been working on BioShock 4, which had reportedly run into issues with the project. Publisher 2K Games has also laid-off an unspecified number of staff at Cloud Chamber as it looks to “rework certain aspects” of the title. This included the former studio head Kelley Gilmore.
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Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 opened Gamescom Opening Night Live with a mind-bending trailer. The Activision Blizzard shooter will release on November 14.
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TT Games is back with a new open world LEGO Batman game called: LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight. It follows the huge success of the developer’s last game, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, which was one of the best-selling titles of 2022.
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Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War 4 was revealed at Gamescom, and it will not be made by franchise stalwarts Relic Entertainment. German studio KING Art Games (the team behind 2020 RTS Iron Harvest) has taken on the project.
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Microsoft finally announced another game for Nintendo Switch 2. The firm’s critically acclaimed Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is coming to Nintendo’s latest machine in 2026. So far, Microsoft has only announced and released Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 for the device.
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A major expansion for World of Warcraft, called Midnight, will release on or before June 30, 2026.
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A new Black Myth game was the closing title for Gamescom Opening Night Live. Last year’s action RPG Black Myth: Wukong was a smash hit worldwide for Chinese developer Game Science (it has sold over 25 million copies). The next game will be called Black Myth: Zhong Kui. It currently doesn’t have a release date.
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Alongside the new announcements, Opening Night Live also featured new trailers for Resident Evil Requiem, Silent Hill F, Ghost of Yotei and The Outer Worlds 2.
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We also saw a trailer for a Nightdive remaster of forgotten Lucasfilm Games classic Outlaws, which I wanted to mention because I’m all over it.
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Finally, the Devcom conference will be called Gamecom Dev starting from October 2025. The change is to bring the conference closer to the Gamescom family of events.
That’s it for this week’s Gamescom coverage, but we’ve a lot more Cologne goodness to share with you next week, including a recording of our live show. All our Gamescom coverage was sponsored by Keywords Studios and Green Man Gaming, which was jolly nice of them. Thank you for reading.
