Xbox Showcase & Starfield Direct: Vice President reveals what to expect next week

In less than a week, the big Xbox Showcase will start, followed by the Starfield Direct all about the space epic. Xbox Vice President Aaron Greenberg has now commented on the event in more detail in advance and revealed some details of what to expect.

Next Sunday, June 11, 2023, Microsoft will hold its big summer Xbox Showcase – the most important event to present its own upcoming players, which otherwise took place as part of the E3 in Los Angeles, which is known to fall through this year. Microsoft is even running a double feature with Bethesda, because after the general Xbox Showcase there is also the special Starfield Direct, which focuses exclusively on Bethesda’s upcoming space epic.

What exactly is planned now? The Xbox Showcase is said to last around two hours, with a focus on games from Xbox Studios and Bethesda. Xbox Vice President Aaron Greenberg revealed via Twitter that games are really the focus of the event. In a tweet, he says the showcase will feature “games, games, games, games and Starfield.”

Microsoft can’t resist taking a dig at its competitor Sony either, because according to Greenberg none of their own games will then be presented exclusively using a CG trailer. Especially on Sony’s last PlayStation Showcase, such CG trailers could be seen without real gameplay – a circumstance that Microsoft also distinguished in the past, when they presented titles like Fable, Perfect Dark or Avowed, which at that time were still in were at an early stage of development. “Everything is either in-game footage, in-engine footage, or in-game footage with some cinematics. Each of our trailers will be labeled as such, so hopefully that will be clear to our fans,” said Greenberg.

Next little dig: “There will be no movie trailers in our games show,” Greenberg continued. Recently, Sony also included the trailer for the live-action adaptation of Gran Turismo in the showcase. And one more change from last year: The showcase will not only show games that are scheduled to be released for the Xbox within the next 12 months. With such an announcement, you went into the showcase in 2022, but later had to admit that a number of titles such as Forza Motorsport, Ark 2 or STALKER 2 could not keep to this release time window anyway. So this time, such a promise is being dropped and we are also daring to look beyond the medium-term horizon.