If You Were Releasing A Game, Which Month Of The Year Would You Pick?

It’s no surprise that many publishers continue to target the busy October and November periods for their major releases ahead of the holidays, but if you look at the top-rated Xbox games of 2025 according to Metacritic, many of them went much earlier this year — Monster Hunter Wilds in February, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 in February, Split Fiction in March, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 in April, Blue Prince in April… the list goes on.

Xbox obviously has multiple major games to schedule in 2026, so we’ll likely see a mix of dates ranging from early in the year to somewhere around November, but even if you take GTA out of the equation, there’s still a difficult balancing act to ensure you stand out while also setting up your game for the best chances of monetary success.

So, let’s have a discussion about this! If you were releasing a game and you knew it was ready to go at some point over the next twelve months, which month would you pick ideally? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.