Blade, big Marvel game from Microsoft studio announced, yet Xbox hasn’t claimed it as an exclusive

Blade, a blockbuster Marvel game from a Microsoft-owned studio, was announced at The Game Awards last night, but without any mentions of Xbox – or any confirmation as to whether it’ll be an Xbox exclusive.

In case you went to bed at a reasonable hour or decided just to wait for the inevitable roundups, one of the biggest announcements at 2023’s The Game Awards was that Arkane Lyon is working on Marvel’s Blade. It’s an official tie-in that’ll no doubt have a lot of people interested, but all of the promo surrounding it has been strangely devoid of mentions of Xbox, which owns Arkane through the developer’s parent company Zenimax.

Yup, if you look through the announcement trailer for Marvel’s Blade or the show segment that followed its appearance (it starts at around the two hour and 20 minute mark) you won’t find the usual splashes or mentions of Xbox that came with the likes of Starfield, just to use a recent example.

Meanwhile, Xbox wire simply links to a story about the announcement on Bethesda.net, which also doesn’t include any specific mentions of Xbox in it. You can contrast this with the Bethesda.net story that followed the announcement of Arkane Austin’s Redfall back in 2021, which features multiple mentions not just that the game was an Xbox Series X/S and PC exclusive, but also that it’d be coming to Xbox Game Pass on day one.

We reached out to Bethesda in order to ask if Marvel’s Blade is an Xbox console exclusive and the company declined to comment.

The differences outlined here could simply be due to something like one game having received a bunch of Xbox wrapping because it was announced during an Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase, while the other was announced during a show that isn’t Xbox-specific, but they do seem noteworthy nonetheless.

As outlined in the aforementioned article from Bethesda, Marvel’s Blade “will take players to a quarantined section of Paris in the middle of a supernatural emergency. Vampires have emerged, terrorizing the city of lights and forcing Parisians to shelter inside their homes at night to wait for sunrise.”

In other Arkane-related news, Redfall’s third update arrived in mid-November and added a new weapon to the game, as well as including some fixes aimed at performance stability and AI behaviour.