2025 looks like a great year for Xbox

There’s a long-running joke in the Xbox community that Microsoft will finally hit its stride with Game Pass and Xbox releases “next year.” The joke has been going around since 2018, when Microsoft made a series of big studio acquisitions to create more Xbox games and make Game Pass more appealing. Year after year, Xbox fans have been waiting for a solid 12 months of new games to play, and it now looks like 2025 is going to be that “next year” everyone has been waiting for.

The annual Xbox Developer Direct this week was nothing short of excellent, after a turbulent year for the platform in 2024. Microsoft kicked the event off with a promise that all games shown would be on Game Pass, and impressively, they’d all be Xbox Play Anywhere titles so you can buy once and play on Xbox consoles and PC. It then dropped two big surprises: Ninja Gaiden 4 and a shadow drop of the remastered Ninja Gaiden 2 Black.

Published by Xbox Game Studios, Ninja Gaiden 4 is the latest entry in a long-running franchise that’s seen a lot of success on Xbox in the past. So it’s no surprise that Team Ninja also picked Microsoft to debut the remaster of Ninja Gaiden II. 

South of Midnight finally got a release date and a deeper dive into the gameplay and story, too. The game has a narrative that will touch on Southern folklore, and the artwork is stunning. It’s heading to Game Pass on April 8th and will be joined that month by Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 — the debut title from Sandfall Interactive. The turn-based RPG has been developed by a team full of former Ubisoft developers. It features a host of voice acting talent and includes turn-based combat that’s similar to Persona 5. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 launches on April 24th.

Microsoft finished the Developer Direct with a deeper dive into id Software’s Doom: The Dark Ages. There’s a big focus on melee combat this time around and a bunch of new UI sliders that let you adjust the game speed or parry timing. It looks like Doom: The Dark Ages will have some unique gameplay that sets it apart from previous entries in the Doom franchise, and I’m really looking forward to playing this one on May 15th.

Three out of the four games featured in the Developer Direct are also coming to PS5 (South of Midnight being the exception). It was amusing to see the developers avoid verbally mentioning the PS5 during the Developer Direct, but Microsoft was more than happy to list the availability of Ninja Gaiden 4, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and Doom: The Dark Ages on PS5 at the end of each segment. It’s a refreshing change from when Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo pretended other platforms didn’t exist for multi-platform game announcements.

But Microsoft also highlighted its own ecosystem advantage as it debuted these cross-platform games. These titles will launch day one on Game Pass, Xbox Play Anywhere, and Xbox Cloud Gaming. That makes Xbox the most flexible way to buy these games or subscribe to play them because Microsoft offers cross-saves, cross-progression, and the ability to play them on PC, Xbox consoles, or stream them to many other devices you own. 

These three new games now make for a packed series of Xbox Game Pass releases in the coming months. Obsidian’s Avowed is arriving on February 18th, just weeks after Sniper Elite: Resistance, Eternal Strands, and Citizen Sleeper 2 appear on day one in Game Pass. The Alters is also supposed to debut on Game Pass in early 2025. That means there won’t be a month between now and June when subscribers don’t have something to look forward to, and that’s just the first half of the year.

Microsoft’s Xbox summer showcase will then set the stage for the rest of the year and beyond. Ninja Gaiden 4 is coming in the fall, but Microsoft has also previously announced that The Outer Worlds 2 and Fable are 2025 releases. It will also be interesting to see if Gears of War: E-Day will make the 2025 release date I’d heard Microsoft was planning for last year.

There could be some more surprises on the way, too. In recent weeks, rumors have pointed toward a remaster of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I first heard about this remaster last year, and at the time, Microsoft was tentatively targeting a release in late spring or early summer 2025. I’m also hoping we hear more about Contraband or Clockwork Revolution at the Xbox summer showcase.

If Microsoft can deliver a second half of 2025 packed with games like it did toward the end of 2024 with hits like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, it looks like Xbox Game Pass will have its best year yet. If Microsoft somehow fails to deliver, then, as Xbox fans say, there’s always next year.

Microsoft’s executive vice president of business development, strategy, and its M12 venture fund, Chris Young, resigned from his role earlier this week, the company disclosed in an SEC filing. While it seemed like a surprise announcement, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in an internal memo that the pair had been discussing Young’s entrepreneurial interests and his “next play” over the past year.

“During Chris’ tenure, he and the team have led hundreds of strategic partnerships across key sectors spanning AI and cybersecurity, while also advancing our opportunity in emerging areas such as autonomous transportation and digital biology – laying the groundwork for our future growth,” says Nadella.

Young will stay at Microsoft until the end of March to help transition the business development and M12 teams over to Microsoft’s financial organization. Jon Tinter, who reports to Young and currently leads the business development team at Microsoft, is taking on “an expanded remit of business development and M12 ventures” and will report directly to Microsoft CFO Amy Hood. “Jon is one of the people I work most closely with day-to-day (probably more so than he’d like!) as he and his team are behind our most critical deals and manage our most strategic AI partnerships,” says Nadella.

In a separate email, Hood noted Young’s “special way” of giving direct feedback to Microsoft’s senior leadership team, with positive feedback and energy. “Even when we could be deep in Microsoft speak, he managed to always see our company and our products through the eyes of our customers which I respect deeply.”

• Microsoft’s Steam-like browser overlay is now available on Windows 11. After months of beta testing, Microsoft’s new in-game browser overlay on Windows 11 was released this week. The Microsoft Edge Game Assist feature is a widget that appears in the Game Bar in Windows 11, much like Valve’s Steam overlay browser. It’s also game-aware, so it can detect games you’re playing and offer up tips and guides in a little side panel. It very much reminds me of the Xbox One snap assist feature.
• Xbox beta tests support for massive amounts of external storage. If you need more than 16TB of external storage on your Xbox, perhaps for Call of Duty games, Microsoft has you covered. A new software update is being tested with some Xbox Insiders this week that supports partitioning hard disks larger than 16TB into segments that can be used for game storage space. You’ll still have to transfer Xbox Series S / X games to local storage or the Xbox expansion cards, but if you really want to store more than 16TB of Xbox games, you’ll be able to soon.
• Microsoft opens testing for Windows AI search. If you have a Qualcomm-powered Copilot Plus PC, you can now opt in to testing the new AI-powered Windows search interface. It’s designed to make it easier to search for things with natural language, so “dog” instead of trying to find “IMG0071.JPG.” It uses the local NPU to speed up search, but it’s limited to Windows settings and files with image and text formats right now. This is one of the ways I like to see AI impacting Windows to improve the basic tasks.
• Yes, there’s an Excel world championship. Twelve finalists faced off at the HyperX Arena in Las Vegas last month in an effort to be named the world’s best spreadsheeter. I know this sounds like a joke, but it’s really not. My colleague David Pierce did an excellent deep dive into the world of competitive Excel last year.
• Microsoft is letting OpenAI get its own AI compute now. Microsoft says its relationship with OpenAI has “evolved” to the point where the software giant will no longer be the exclusive provider of cloud infrastructure to OpenAI. We already saw parts of this coming with the Oracle deal last year, and now Microsoft will have a right of first refusal for additional compute capacity for OpenAI. Little else has changed, though, so Microsoft keeps its exclusive rights to OpenAI’s tech for use in Copilot and beyond and the ability for OpenAI’s API to remain exclusive to Azure. The evolved partnership comes hot on the heels of a joint venture between Arm, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and OpenAI to help build AI data centers. The Stargate Project will see OpenAI and SoftBank start a $500 billion AI data center company, assuming they get the funding required to make that a reality. Elon Musk seems to think the Stargate deal is a sham. Nadella was questioned about the funding this week. “All I know is I’m good for my $80 billion,” he said in response, referring to Microsoft’s planned investments into Azure for AI for fiscal 2025.
• Microsoft is rumored to launch a smaller Surface Pro and Surface Laptop soon. While it looks like Intel-powered versions of the Surface Pro 11 and Surface Laptop 7 are due next week, Windows Central reports that Microsoft is also working on a smaller Surface Pro and Surface Laptop. They’re rumored to be powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips, and both may appear this spring.
• The thesaurus might be disappearing from Microsoft Word. If you regularly look for synonyms inside Word, then you’re probably part of a group surprised to see Microsoft is about to remove the app’s thesaurus. The way it has been removed is rather clunky on the web versions, but Microsoft did warn its Smart Lookup feature, which includes the thesaurus functionality, was going away on January 1st. I’m still seeing the thesaurus in desktop versions of Word, but I don’t know how long it will stay that way given it’s already been removed in the web version. I’ve reached out to Microsoft to clarify what’s going on.
• Microsoft will automatically keep you signed in to your account starting in February. Microsoft is making some changes to the way you sign in to a Microsoft account next month. Starting in February, you will stay signed in to a Microsoft account automatically unless you sign out or use a private browsing session. For most people, this is probably a good change, but people who use a public computer will need to be especially careful about logging out of their session. Microsoft started warning Outlook.com users about this earlier this month, and the changes go live in February.
• The Microsoft store in the UK is no more. Microsoft is closing the doors of its flagship retail store in London next month. The store originally opened just months before the covid-19 pandemic began, and Microsoft was quick to change it into an “experience center,” alongside closing its retail stores in the US in 2020. It makes me wonder how long the New York City “experience center” will last.

Thanks for subscribing and reading to the very end. I’ll be back to the regular Thursday installment of Notepad starting next week, after a busy period of GPU reviews.

If you’ve heard about any of Microsoft’s other secret projects, you can reach me via email at notepad@theverge.com or speak to me confidentially on the Signal messaging app, where I’m tomwarren.01. I’m also tomwarren on Telegram, if you’d prefer to chat there.