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According to Windows Central's Jez Corden, citing sources familiar with Microsoft's internal performance data, a whole slate of Xbox titles failed to meet expectations. The list includes Avowed, Keeper, Kiln, South of Midnight, Senua's Saga: Hellblade II, Forza Motorsport, and The Outer Worlds 2.
It will probably come as a surprise to see some of these on the list since a lot of them reviewed decently. Avowed sits at 80 on Metacritic; The Outer Worlds 2 earned a 82 Metascore with multiple 90/100 reviews. So what went wrong?
Lets take Forza Motorsport (2023) as an example. The game launched with missing tracks, a baffling career mode and AI that never quite worked right. For a franchise that once defined the simcade racing genre, this was a rare miss. Turn 10 Studios has since added content, but it was never enough. Microsoft abandoned post-launch support soon after.
Fantasy RPG Avowed suffered from its earliest reveal. When Obsidian Entertainment showed that CGI trailer years ago, audiences saw Skyrim's successor. What arrived was The Outer Worlds with swords: compact, dialogue-driven and roughly 40 hours long. As a game, it's genuinely good. As a blockbuster, it's not, and that mismatch crushed public perception.
The Outer Worlds 2 arrived in October 2025 to strong reviews and weak sales. Analyst Daniel Camilo estimates the game sold fewer than one million copies across all platforms in its first three months – roughly half what the original managed in the same window.
Niche games that rarely move the needle
Corden's list also includes two smaller titles that were never going to move the needle. Kiln is a multiplayer PvP game where players craft their character from clay. That's a novel hook in a brutally crowded genre. Keeper is a slow-paced lighthouse-management game with minimal traditional gameplay. Neither is bad. Both are fundamentally niche, and expecting either to drive Game Pass engagement or retail sales was unrealistic from the start.
The report singles out The Initiative and its boondoggle of a Perfect Dark reboot as a particular drag on profitability, citing "inertia" and disruption, which isn't surprising since the studio lost multiple high-profile leads during development, and the game has reportedly been rebooted at least twice.
Undead Labs faced its own turmoil following founder Jeff Strain's departure, but it must be said that the new trailer looked pretty decent and certainly far from a troubled game. One to watch, then, rather than write off.
A new hope
Now, enough of the doom and gloom. None of this suggests Xbox is dying. Game Pass remains a huge business. But Corden's piece points to a specific problem: Microsoft's internal spreadsheets appear to expect blockbuster performance from games built on AA or modest AAA budgets. Or at least that's how it was at one point. It's safe to assume that the new team led by Asha Sharma won't have the all-seeing corpo eye on their backs all the time, at least not in the first year or so.
Xbox have been clear that they are already working on potential solutions. They will focus on their biggest IP so expect much less niche projects like Kiln. They are also exploring a cheaper Game Pass tier that would include ads. On top of this, another wave of layoffs is expected in July. I wouldn't be surprised if some smaller studios end up on the chopping block.
Moving forward, Xbox leadership has to start asking the hardest question before greenlighting a game: what is this actually competing against, and who is genuinely excited to play it?
