Microsoft Ceases Xbox One Game Development

Microsoft has announced that it has ceased the development of games for the Xbox One, which was released in 2013 as its third primary home gaming console. The console underwent several hardware revisions, including the Xbox One S and the more potent Xbox One X (initially known as Project Scorpio), in an attempt to compete with the PlayStation 4. It has been almost ten years since the console’s launch.

“We’ve moved to Gen 9,” Matt Booty, director of Xbox game studios, told Axios. Microsoft has said that there are no first-party games under development under the Xbox Studios umbrella, but that doesn’t mean Microsoft is leaving users in the dust and ending support for the console.

Microsoft is using Xbox Game Pass and its cloud streaming services to power the last-gen console. As noted by The Verge, the gaming giant offers games such as Microsoft Flight Simulator to the console using cloud streaming, and going forward, Matt Booty admits that this is how Microsoft maintains support for the system.

Notably, at the recently concluded Xbox Games Showcase this week, Microsoft didn’t show off any first-party games for the system — as it was able to run natively.

From the looks of it, it looks like Microsoft is going all out with their current generation Xbox Series X and Series S consoles and has finally embraced the ‘next generation’. The company has first-party games in development, including Fable, Starfield, and the Forza Motorsport reboot.

Especially games like Bethesda’s Starfield list, where SSD is the basic spec for PC users, and considering the Xbox One and even the more powerful One X offer HDDs, it’s hard to support consoles going forward.

Rival brand PlayStation is also slowing down support for the PS4 console, with games such as Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Final Fantasy XVI only being released on the PS5 going forward.