Earlier this week, Xbox gave us an idea of when to expect its two biggest games of 2026: Forza Horizon 6 will land on May 15, and the long-awaited Fable reboot will arrive sometime in the fall. But oddly, while Fable is launching on the same (as-yet unknown) day on Xbox and PS5, Horizon 6 isn’t. Instead, its PS5 version will arrive sometime after the Xbox release. When pressed on why this was the case, one Xbox exec provided a confusing answer.
In a new interview with GamesRadar, Xbox Game Studios head Craig Duncan told the outlet that he and Xbox have a “pretty simple view” about bringing their games and franchises, like Halo and Gears of War, to more platforms. “We want our games to reach the most players that we can,” explained Duncan. “It’s rarely more complicated than that. It’s like, how can we get this game to as many players as we can?”
Okay, sure, we’ve heard this before from Xbox. They want to be on more platforms and give people more ways to play. Fine. But when asked specifically why Fable is launching at the same time on Xbox and PS5, but Forza Horizon 6 isn’t, Duncan admitted that “sometimes we are inconsistent.”
“You see some games in one place, some games in multiple places,” Duncan told the outlet. “Just know that we’re going to work on that, and we’re going to try and be more consistent with what we do.”
According to him, Xbox won’t commit to every future game launching day one on PS5 because the company wants to “maintain optionality.”
“If we’re only in a position to release a game on a platform and not have it show up really well? Then I think we wouldn’t do that. I think we would have a conversation internally and go, ‘Hey, unless we can do it really well and do the right thing by those players, then…’ and that’s when you get into conversations of, well, maybe we can ship it afterwards. Because teams are only a set size. We only have a certain amount of…ultimately, it all comes down to resources. Not everything is limitless. So we just want to do the best job, by each platform, by each game.”
According to Duncan, sometimes games need extra time to get them running on a different platform. And that does sound plausible. But it is very convenient that Forza Horizon 6, a super hyped-up sequel to one of Xbox’s biggest hits, isn’t coming to PS5 right away. Meanwhile, Fable, a long-delayed reboot of a franchise that has been MIA for over a decade, is launching on PS5 as well as Xbox. You could theorize that Xbox wants to keep Forza on its platforms, like Xbox Cloud and Game Pass, as exclusives for an extended period of time, and push people to play there. Regardless, it’s clear that the future of Xbox’s multiplatform strategy is kind of all over the place and will likely continue to be that way for the foreseeable future.