Microsoft has revealed they are launching a new Xbox Partner Preview event this week.
As they revealed in Xbox Wire, the first Xbox Partner Preview is coming this Wednesday, October 25, at 10am Pacific time / 1pm Eastern time / 6pm UK time. It will be available to stream on YouTube, to as much as 4K 60FPS. It will also be available on Twitch, and via regional Xbox channels, depending on what’s available where you live.
Following Microsoft’s push to bring Xbox to more regions, the stream will be available in many languages. Concurrently, there will also be accommodations for low/no hearing and low/no vision gamers to experience the stream.
Microsoft made it clear, as Phil Spencer had promised earlier this month, that this event will not be featuring any games from Activision Blizzard King. They instead named these games to be appearing on stream:
- Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth
- Alan Wake 2
- Ark: Survival Ascended
- Dungeons of Hinterberg
As Microsoft describes Xbox Partner Preview, “this new show format will deliver a fresh mix of indie games and familiar favorites from our third-party partners.” This first show will run 20 minutes and include trailers and gameplay footage. Definitely, there will be more games featured than what have been named above.
As far as how Microsoft has described them, these Xbox Partner Preview events seem to closely match Nintendo’s Indie World Showcase. There are never going to be any major games in these shows, but Microsoft is presumably doing the work of curating games to showcase some particular highlights of what’s upcoming to their platforms.
From a marketing standpoint, it’s also a very strong move for Microsoft to already have this lined up so soon after their purchase of Activision Blizzard King. Microsoft is sending the message that Xbox is already a big platform that carries games from all over the industry, and they don’t even need to tip their hand on the Activision Blizzard King library yet to give fans more games to play.
Microsoft could also use this as an opportunity to introduce some surprises, such as new releases from unrevealed partners, or new exclusive projects, such as the rumored Project Maverick that studio People Can Fly has been starting to talk about more publicly.
We are still a few weeks off from the end of the year, but if this is Microsoft’s last event of the year, they would be ending it quite strong.
