Alan Wake 2 and Ark: Survival Ascended will be part of a new event coming this week from the folks at Xbox called Xbox Partner Preview. On October 25 at 10 am PT, Xbox will showcase several games from their third-party partners, including Remedy Entertainment (Alan Wake 2), Studio Wildcard (Ark: Survival Ascended), and Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio.
The show will be smaller in scale, with about 20 minutes of trailers and new gameplay footage. We’ll also hear about games coming to Game Pass in the future.
A quick note on Ark: Survival Ascended. This is the remaster of the first title, not the sequel that has also been announced.
The marketing team at Xbox also clarifies that there won’t be any news, game reveals, or Game Pass info on games from Activision Blizzard. While Microsoft has formally closed its deal to acquire Acitiviosn Blizzard, work is underway to get games from the huge publisher to Game Pass.
Microsoft’s Phil Spencer was recently on an official Xbox podcast and said fans shouldn’t expect games from this deal to appear on Game Pass until 2024. That means Call of Duty fans on Xbox will have to make the $70 purchase for the game for at least one more year.
Here’s the full quote from Spencer:
“The regulatory process took so long… that we weren’t able to get in and work with the Activision Blizzard on that back catalog work. Now that the deal is closed, we’re starting that work, but there is work. I think the Activision Twitter handle… did put out something that talked about 2024, and I think that’s accurate. I would love it if there was some kind of secret celebration drop that’s coming in the next couple of weeks — there’s not.”
And here’s the post from Activision that Spencer is referring to.
It’ll be interesting to see how Xbox decides to roll out Game Pass integration with Activision Blizzard. With Bethesda, Xbox quickly announced a batch of 20 games shortly after the acquisition was finalized. Ten more came a few months later during the Xbox/Bethesda showcase during E3 2021.
We’ll see if they take a similar approach with Activision Blizzard.