On paper, Xbox’s Gamescom show was nothing to shout about. But in person, it showcased the power of Game Pass

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This year’s Gamescom was a strange one. The first year back after the pandemic, many of gaming’s biggest publishers decided to skip the show – which had the welcome effect of shining a brighter spotlight on many games and publishers that usually might have to jostle with the bigger multinational corporations for attention. French publisher Focus Home Interactive, previously best known for games like A Plague Tale and Vampyr, had the best line-up of the show. But another beneficiary of the no-shows was undoubtedly Xbox.

The only one of the ‘big three’ to show up, Xbox had ‘won’ the Gamescom hardware manufacturer competition before the show had even begun. But even then, I looked upon its line-up for the show with my brow furrowed. Is this it? This is a paltry offering. Not even a crumb of Starfield? But now I must hold my hands up. Mea culpa – I was wrong. It was a great line-up – for what it was.

Sure enough, it didn’t have the big-name announcements you might most desire. The biggest first-party games down on the Xbox stand were simply updates to existing rolling service games like Sea of Thieves and Grounded. The booth was dominated by attention-grabbing, line-up distracting photo ops. And, bluntly, there were a laughable number of stations to play – if you managed to get on anything in that stand during the public visiting hours, you were very lucky indeed.

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