GDC 2025: How to Ensure a Successful Xbox Game Launch

The countdown to your game launch is in its final weeks. You've crafted an exceptional product page and an even more captivating game trailer. Gamers everywhere are eagerly anticipating the chance to dive into your creation. The excitement is palpable. Are you ready to make your mark?

During my time at Xbox, I’ve been lucky enough to see many First Party game launches from start to finish as well as learn from some of the smart folks with years of experience around me.

When it comes to launching your game, there are many things to think about and focus on. Regardless of whether you are launching an Indie game or a massive AAA title, there are challenges that all teams face. We definitely notice this in First Party games but they are equally applicable to all games.

In this article, we will talk about a list of useful best practices and suggestions to ensure that your game goes to market successfully. These are tried and tested best practices that we implement here within Xbox Game Studios.

Let’s dive in!

Top Failing Certification Cases

While each game is unique, most games face similar challenges during certification. When a studio submits their game for Xbox certification, our team runs a series of test cases. We often find that certain test cases consistently fail across multiple games. For instance, most issues we find are related to title stability, such as crashes, hangs, or long loading screens when launching the game. This also includes crashes during gameplay or multiplayer activities like sending and receiving game invites, matchmaking, and joining scenarios.

To learn more about optimizing for these kind of issues, we highly recommend checking out this article entitled Top failing test cases on console as well as another article entitled Top failing test cases on PC. These will provide you with key test areas as well as tips and strategies to test for in the build up to release. This will save you time and catch those quick wins before submitting your game for Xbox certification.

Performance

We highly recommend using PIX to profile your games. PIX is a performance tuning and debugging tool for Windows and Xbox game developers using DirectX. It allows you to debug and analyze GPU captures, create timing captures to understand the performance and threading of all CPU and GPU work, and monitor real-time counter data while a game is running.

One of the great features of PIX is its handy check list feature that can identify “low hanging fruit” with regards to GPU performance. This list provides you with easier to fix issues that you might sometimes miss.

The great thing about PIX is that it allows you to switch between different console modes and profile your game against a Xbox Series S. Often when building your game, the focus is on the more powerful Xbox Series X and this functionality can help you identify additional performance opportunities that might not be noticeable on Xbox Series X.

Hold a Bug Bash

Within Xbox Game Studios, we regularly hold Bug Bashes. A Bug Bash is a collaborative testing event where teams of testers, developers, and other stakeholders come together to find and report hidden bugs and issues before a major release. During a bug bash, cross-functional teams work together to identify and document bugs, ensuring that the product is as polished as possible before it goes live.

The great thing about a bug bash is that it's free – all you need is a group of people to dive in and play the game. This is especially important for multiplayer or networked games. Having multiple people online at once can simulate real-world server load and lightly test your networked code. Participants can link bugs to quests, log bugs, and provide feedback on gameplay systems. The bug bash aims to cover different levels of the game, focusing on crashes and stability issues.

Game Saves

Believe it or not, game saves can be a tricky part of game development. We’ve seen many issues with game saves over the years, from lost game saves to corrupt ones. As a player, there is nothing more frustrating than losing all your hard-earned game progress and having to start all over again.

This is especially important during the early days of your game launch. The last thing you want is for your players to lose their game saves or experience save issues until you release a patch.

If you’d like to learn more about these Game Save best practices, the Xbox platform team have created a handy guide - please follow this link for more information.

Optional Certification

Here at Xbox, we have a certification process called “Optional Submissions”. Think of it as a practice run for your title before you submit it for final certification. An optional submission provides an opportunity to validate how a title is doing from a Certification perspective before submitting your release candidate build.

It’s a great way to catch any early issues and our certification team will provide you with a list of issues and suggestions. This gives you as a team the time to iron out any early issues.

We would also strongly recommend going through an Optional Certification to align on a good trajectory 3-6 months prior to Final Cert. You might feel that it’s a bit early and your game is still rough, but it's better to start identifying potential issues that could stop you from shipping on your desired release date, and learn good practices at an earlier stage.

Know when to go pencils down

Knowing when to stop and pause is another important part of releasing your game. As a Studio, you should aim to clear Certification with your release build with enough time before game launch, and you should stick with a known good build. This helps ensure that your build is stable and gives you time to fix the more minor issues at a later time. As the saying goes, “perfect is the enemy of good” – and this is a great example of that situation.

While it may be tempting, rushing out an untested build to fix a minor texture issue or localization bug is a sure fire way to introduce nasty bugs on launch day.

Consider Server Load

If you use a service like Azure Playfab for your game, it is worth planning ahead and thinking about the load on the services that your game will use. For example, if you use matchmaking or multiplayer servers, are they ready for the number of players that you expect on launch day? Have you done your due diligence around this?

Whether its load balancing or scaling up your servers, it’s important that your gamers aren’t faced with long queue waits or in the worst case, not even being able to play your game.

We recommend speaking to our Azure Event Management (AEM)  team to assess up front potential gaps that could negatively affect performance and availability during your game launch. The AEM team will proactively examine the health of your production subscription for Storage capacity, CPU, Disk Failures, IOPS Optimization, Availability Set Isolation and other potential single points of failure. 

 For more information about Azure Event Management (AEM), contact your Microsoft representative or visit the Microsoft Unified website.

They will support you during the build up to game release and on release day itself. Providing you with useful forecasting tips and rapid fire resolution to any Cloud based issues that occur.

Time Zones

As a game developer, you will want to release to as many markets as possible. While this might not seem obvious at first, the time of day that you choose to release your game can make your life tricky. Our suggestion is to avoid a rolling midnight launch which means that the product becomes available at midnight in each respective time zone, rather than at a single global time. Here at Xbox Game Studios, we prefer to pick a good time that applies across the world and is well suited to both the studio and support teams. We also aim not to ship on a Friday or a weekend.

While it might mean an early (or late) start for your release team, having this in place ensures that you and your support team are in place at the right time to make any fixes / adjustments should you be needed.

Conclusion

In conclusion, launching a game successfully is a critical milestone that requires meticulous planning and attention to detail. From ensuring stability during certification to optimizing performance with tools like PIX, every step plays a vital role in delivering a polished product. Holding bug bashes and considering server load are essential practices that can significantly impact the player experience. Knowing when to go pencils down and choosing the right time zones for your release can make a substantial difference in the smoothness of your launch. By following these best practices and suggestions, you can make a lasting impact and keep players coming back for more. Remember, you only get one chance to launch your game, so make it count!