Xbox and Bethesda not-E3 Games Showcase will be around 90 minutes long UK WIRE

Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase graphic — What secrets are in store? (pic: Microsoft)

Microsoft’s big preview event is going to be around an hour and a half long, implying a showcase on the same scale as their E3 shows.

The first three months of 2022 may have been unusually busy for video games but one glance at the current release schedules makes it obvious that the subsequent three months, and beyond, aren’t nearly so stacked.

Not only is it unclear what most companies are planning to release later in the year but it’s just as hard to guess when they’ll even reveal their plans, especially as there’s no E3 this year.

The one company that has laid their cards on the table though is Microsoft, who have a preview event scheduled for June 12 – which is sounding increasingly like it’s going to be just as big as a regular E3 showcase.

After a fan discovered what seemed to be evidence that the showcase would last 90 minutes, Xbox marketing boss Aaron Greenberg confirmed that while there isn’t yet an official runtime he does expect it to last ‘close to that 90 minute mark’.

Clearly that’s a long show, so there’s every reason to hope that it will host some major new announcements and reveals. In fact, that’s virtually guaranteed, since Microsoft currently doesn’t have a single game scheduled with a confirmed release date.

We don’t have a final show run time yet. But yes typically we end up close to that 90 mins mark. Will keep folks posted as we get closer!

— Aaron Greenberg 🙅🏼‍♂️💚U (@aarongreenberg) May 4, 2022

It’s easy enough to guess what the most likely titles to be featured are, including Fable, Forza Motorsport, The Outer Worlds 2, Avowed, Hellblade 2, and Redfall, but officially speaking none are confirmed.

At this point it’s not wise to suggest any are guaranteed since, as Greenberg implies, the line-up for these sort of shows is always in a constant state of flux and sometimes can change literally minutes before a presentation.

When is the next big PlayStation preview event?

Nintendo has been more forthcoming about its 2022 releases and probably doesn’t have a lot of secrets left to reveal, since Pokémon Scarlet and Violet seems to be its big Christmas release. It’s likely to follow Microsoft though, by having a new Nintendo Direct at roughly the same time as E3 would’ve been.

Sony is much harder to read though, not least because they’d given up on E3 long before the pandemic. At the moment they’re in largely the same position as Microsoft, with God Of War: Ragnarök being the only exclusive currently scheduled for this year – even if it doesn’t yet have a date yet.

What’s different about Sony though is that they have nothing else even hinted at yet, beyond Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2 and Wolverine games, and the VR Horizon Forbidden West spin-off – none of which are expected to be out this year.