While Grand Theft Auto 6 is casting a large shadow over the gaming industry, with previous reports of game developers being worried about releasing in the same window as Rockstar Games’ upcoming title, Xbox Game Studios head Craig Duncan doesn’t seem too worried. In an interview with GamesRadar, Duncan spoke about its November 19 release date being in the same window as Fable‘s Fall 2026 launch.
He noted that, ultimately, it’s up to Rockstar Games to “do what they’re going to do,” and his job is to focus more on what Xbox Game Studios can do in the service of the games being released under its banner.
“I mean, it’s more that they’re going to do what they’re going to do,” said Duncan. “My job is to do what we should do for the best of our games. So yeah, we don’t… there’s always other games, and there’s always other things we have to consider.”
Xbox Game Studios is also focused on making sure that its various releases don’t crowd each other, which eventually lead to them cannibalizing each others’ sales. Rather, the company is focused on spacing out its releases.
“I think that we ideally want to space things out and make sure games have their own, as we like to call it, oxygen in those moments,” he explained. “It’s just super busy. Our own release schedule is one thing, but then you have everyone else’s release schedule at the same time.”
Generally speaking, there is also the fact that there aren’t many windows where games can come out this year and not instantly be crowded with other releases, be they games, movies or music. “There are very few windows and there’s more and more games, and more competition for a player’s time,” he said. “There’s also movies, music, and all this other stuff as well that gets packed in. So the learning was this: let’s not put stuff on top of our stuff, and I think we have done that. Let our games have a bit of oxygen, even though it’s always busy and there’s never really a free time to launch something.”
Duncan’s thoughts on the release window of Fable comes on the heels of new details about the open-world RPG being revealed. Among these details is the fact that the title will have 1,000 hand-crafted NPCs populating its world. Just last week, studio founder Ralph Fulton spoke about how there were discussions about procedurally generating these NPCs, “but we abandoned that idea quite a long time ago because we wanted to craft every one of these NPCs from their name, to their appearance, to their personality traits, to that moral worldview that I talked about, to where they work and where they live and what their family unit is, because it’s important to the player that they can get to know unique crafted NPCs.”
Incidentally, this also led to creating a lot more work for the environment art team, since every one of these NPCs has a schedule, which means that they also need beds that they can go to when it’s time for them to sleep.
For more on Fable, check out why its world will be smaller than that of a Forza Horizon game, and why your character’s body won’t morph as a consequence of your moral choices.
