How ‘Indiana Jones’ and ‘Call of Duty’ Are Pushing Xbox Ahead of PlayStation, Nintendo in a Next Gen Console-Less Holiday Season

For lots of avid gamers this holiday season, there will be Indiana Jones — and then everybody else.

Microsoft’s gaming division, after spending billions on developers and publishers over the last three years, is seeing its big bets pay off. In the fourth quarter of 2024, when consumers largely look to buy and gift AAA titles, there’s no new generation of consoles — usually the driving force behind game purchases — on the market. And Xbox is in the best position to get the Christmas cash with the Dec. 9 launch of “Indiana Jones and the Great Circle,” the industry’s biggest new game of the year.

Developed by Bethesda’s MachineGames in partnership with Lucasfilm, “Great Circle” has been in the works since before Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda parent ZeniMax in 2021 and has been a hotly anticipated title over the five years it’s been in development.

“I’ve been an Indiana Jones fan my entire life. When I saw the movie, I believed it was all real, and I was just enamored with ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ since it came out,” Bethesda Game Studios director and executive producer Todd Howard, who created the concept for “Indiana Jones and the Great Circle,” told Variety. “That movie has remained my favorite movie of all time. I named my dog Indiana. I got the jacket, I got all the stuff. I’ve loved the character and the world, which I think is important, that sort of pulpy adventure world of the ’30s, that kind of genre. And I’d always thought about what kind of game would I like to play in Indiana Jones? And I also like these mysteries of the world. I stumbled upon this one, which is The Great Circle — which is a thing, I didn’t invent it — that thought, this would be great for an Indiana Jones video game when I read about it, and thought about what the mystery could lead to.”

Howard pitched the idea to what was then LucasArts in 2009, and due to complications around who would publish the game, the idea fell through. But in 2019, Howard’s project resurfaced when his friend John Drake, who previously worked as an exec at Sony, moved over to Disney’s gaming division and got the “Great Circle” boulder rolling again with Lucasfilm Games.

Now, “Indiana Jones and the Great Circle” is Xbox’s highest priority for 2024 and comes on the heels of the Oct. 25 launch of the latest addition to the Activision-produced “Call of Duty” series, “Black Ops 6,” which came through Microsoft’s massive Activision Blizzard deal that closed last year. Microsoft said “Black Ops 6” had the biggest opening weekend of any game in the franchise and has maintained that status over the past month — ranking No. 1 in total players, hours played and total matches. The company didn’t release sales figures for “Black Ops 6,” but said with its release, the “Call of Duty” franchise has now sold more than 500 million copies.

The momentum has put Xbox in front of longtime rival PlayStation. “From a pure content perspective, we must conclude that Microsoft’s portfolio is now quite a bit stronger than Sony’s,” MoffettNathanson analyst Clay Griffin wrote in a Nov. 26 research note.

“Great Circle” is the first — and only — Indiana Jones game of this size that Lucasfilm Games has greenlit. In the first-person game, set after the events of the 1981 Harrison Ford-starrer “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” players go on stealth missions and engage in grand-scale puzzle solving. All told, “Great Circle” is packed with more than three hours of cinematic-quality scenes that play out the larger plot. It stars gaming industry legend Troy Baker (the voice of Joel in PlayStation’s “The Last of Us” franchise) as the iconic archaeologist.

“You really get to inhabit the world of Indiana Jones coming at the end of the year, going into the holidays,” says Matt Booty, Microsoft president of game content and studios. Compared with the rapid-fire, multiplayer action of “Black Ops,” the Indy title is “a more thoughtful adventure game” — which Booty says is well suited to the holiday break, when people have more time on their hands.

In true Indy fashion, Howard says “Great Circle” kicks off with an impressive set piece: “I wish we could spoil it. I would just say, if you’re an ‘Indiana Jones’ fan, it’s opening you’ve wanted.” But from there, the title — which is packed with nods to the overall franchise, including a reference to Disneyland’s Indiana Jones Adventure ride — takes its time.

“The game is pretty slow in its pacing, because it is an adventure game, first and foremost, so we don’t rely so much on action. And I think we have a pacing where these cinematics really fit well into that,” MachineGames executive producer Jerk Gustafsson said. “The game takes place between ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ and ‘The Last Crusade,’ so in that timeline. And we specifically looked at ‘Raiders’ because the character differs a little bit between the movies. What defines him in the game is his obsession with his work. Exploring the past and uncovering history, this led him to where ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ ends, and where ‘The Great Circle’ starts. And I think that’s been one of those key components that we have been working on for the character.”

As for who would voice the character — with 82-year-old “Indiana Jones” star Ford not having been considered an option, given the large age difference between present-day him and the young Dr. Jones in “Raiders” — Lucasfilm had final say when it came to casting Baker.

“That’s the place where we probably have the most input on these games,” Lucasfilm Games vice president Douglas Reilly said. “We don’t tell the teams how to run development. We don’t tell them how to run their day to day of the business. But when it comes to what touches the IPs, we are very much involved in making sure it looks, feels, sounds like Indiana Jones — so we approve casting. We get all the way through the process. We get concept art, to modeling, to final art and and obviously, with a game like this in particular, he is the character and you got to get him right, otherwise it doesn’t feel like an Indiana Jones experience. And between the work MachineGames did in representing him physically and the absolutely stunning work Troy has done voicing the character, you forget it’s not Harrison when you play it. He’s that good.”

As with “Black Ops 6,” Microsoft is making “Great Circle” available to subscribers of Xbox Game Pass for no additional charge — an attempt to mimic Netflix’s model. The Indy game will remain an Xbox and PC exclusive until it comes to PlayStation in spring 2025. The game’s first round of downloadable content (DLC) is set to release at an unspecified date in the new year.

“We are very much making the [exclusivity and windowing] decisions on a game by game basis,” Booty said. “And each of our studios is in a little bit of a different position. There’s also the production timeline on a game, so the decision on spacing comes there first. We want to make sure there’s a great experience for our Xbox players, and then the gap between [when it becomes available on PlayStation] is as much a production decision as it is anything else. This is a game that was in production before we acquired Bethesda, even.”

Microsoft has pivoted away from fighting the console wars “after a multi-decade history of slugging it out,” says Griffin. As the analyst puts it: Xbox’s strategy of “moving up in the gaming value chain” as with marquee content like the new Indy game, alongside advancing Game Pass and cloud gaming, is better than trying to “out-console Nintendo or Sony.”

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If “Great Circle” performs well, it could mean not just holiday success for Xbox, but plans for a larger Indiana Jones gaming franchise between Lucasfilm and MachineGames moving forward.

“Right now, we’re focused on getting this one to the public and getting to the DLC and making this as successful as we can,” Reilly said. “I think we’re always looking for great stories. And the good news is, there’s a lot of space in between the films where we could tell more and more Indiana Jones stories that I think would be super interesting.”

Does that mean “The Great Circle” is considered canon to the overall “Indiana Jones” cinematic universe?

“So canon is such a complicated concept. It is an authentic story set between the two movies of ‘Raiders’ and ‘The Last Crusade,’” Reilly said. “We work closely with the studio and franchise management. So yes, it is meant to be an authentic Indiana Jones experience, in that sense.”