4 Mistakes Microsoft Could Make in 2018

A Lack of First-Party Titles

Without a doubt the biggest mistake Microsoft can make this year is a lack of exclusive releases from its first-party studios. 2017 was definitely a slow year for the Xbox One in terms of first-party content, with only Halo Wars 2, Forza Motorsport 7, and Cuphead headlining the console, alongside some smaller releases. This is especially troubling considering the Xbox One X launched with such little support from Microsoft itself. Sure there were plenty of great third-party titles on the system, but in a year where Sony had Horizon Zero Dawn and Uncharted and Nintendo had Zelda and Mario, Microsoft was definitely lagging behind.

This puts the company in a prime position to really knock things out of the park in 2018, with some quality exclusives that really show off the power of the Xbox One X. We know about a few exclusives at the moment, but many of them are indie projects that haven’t really been sharing development updates in quite a while, like Ashen, Deep Rock Galactic, and State of Decay 2. Meanwhile, Sea of Thieves certainly looks promising enough and hopefully sees a return to form for Rare, however, Crackdown 3 doesn’t inspire a ton of confidence. The game has seen a rocky development cycle including several delays, and even to this point, there’s a lot that’s unknown or up in the air about the game, and we still haven’t heard much about the cloud processing for destruction, outside of it only applying to the multiplayer portion of the game.

On top of this, recent reports indicate 343 is hinting that we won’t see a Halo 6 this year, begging the question, what is coming in 2018? That’s something that Microsoft is going to need to address, and soon. Not putting out a wealth of content that shows off its powerful new console would be a fatal mistake.