Xbox chief looking for a fun year even without Halo or Gears of War releases

Microsoft’s Xbox One enjoyed some well deserved momentum last year following the release of the Xbox One S in August. Last week, the company announced that Xbox One was the top selling console in the US in the second half of 2016 according to NPD, even though it was outsold by Sony’s Playstation 4 during the holiday season. Moreover, we also had some great Xbox exclusive games last year, with the open-word racing game Forza Horizon 3 ranking #7 on Metacritic’s list of best reviewed games of 2016.

Can Microsoft top that in 2017? Well, with Project Scorpio to be launched in late 2017, this year should be another good one for the Xbox fans even though the cancellation of the Xbox exclusive game Scalebound was much talked about last week. Fortunately, Microsoft still a lot of exciting exclusives in the pipeline such as Halo Wars 2, and Xbox head Phil Spencer assured on Twitter that we should expect a “fun year” despite the lack of blockbuster releases.

XB1 games shipping this year are different for us. not Halo FPS/Gears led, new experiences with different IP, will be fun year

— Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) January 17, 2017

As a reminder, this year’s Xbox exclusives will include new exciting IPs such as Sea of Thieves and Cuphead, but we also had very few details so far about Crackdown 3, State of Decay 2 or We Happy Few (and all these games have no precise release date yet). We’re really looking forward to learn more about all these, and if you didn’t do it yet we invite you to check out our extensive list of Xbox games to be released in 2017.