New Report Says Xbox’s ‘Fable’ May Not Release Until 2027

It’s fairly easy to see which AAA games are going to miss their originally stated release date or window, as that’s…almost all of them. For instance, Rockstar swearing that GTA 6 would be out this fall, I never once believed that. Sure enough, we’re gearing up to play GTA 6 in late spring in 2026 now.

This also happened with Fable, allegedly a 2025 release, but back in February, it was delayed to an unspecified time in 2026. Now, it turns out it may be even longer than that.

The news comes from reputable Xbox insider Shpeshal Nick, who said on the Xbox Era podcast that two sources have told him that Fable may not arrive until 2027. Not that anything is going especially wrong, just that it’s just taking longer than they thought.

You can join this with the statement from Head of Xbox Game Studios Craig Duncan back when the original delay was announced, if you want a look at the delay headspace, which may happen twice:

“So, I just want to start with really excited, really excited about progress, really excited where Playground are,” said Duncan. “We previously announced the date for Fable as 2025, we are actually going to give Fable more time and it’s going to ship in 2026 now. While I know that’s not maybe the news people want to hear, what I want to assure people of is that it’s definitely worth the wait. And I just, I have unequivocal confidence in the Playground team.”

For a long while, Microsoft returning to classic IPs, Fable and Perfect Dark, felt like its two biggest pending games. But in the wake of a slew of layoffs and cancellations, Perfect Dark was axed and its entire studio, The Initiative, was shut down. Could that happen to Fable? It seems far less likely. The Initiative was a brand-new studio while Playground is something of a crown jewel in the Xbox stable with their history working on the always-great Forza. Second, Perfect Dark was reportedly plagued with issues for a long time, while we haven’t heard similar doom and gloom for Fable, even if it keeps getting delayed.

Still, this is a typical “announce it a million years before it’s ready” situation, as Fable was first revealed back in 2020 when the Xbox Series X and S also debuted. If we’re talking 2027 now, well, you can do the math. Even if nothing is explicitly “wrong,” it’s still emblematic of where AAA development is now.

The last we saw of Fable was a trailer at the Xbox Games Showcase in June of 2024, seen above, a two and a half minute spot that was a lot more than we’d seen previously. Judging by the amount of dislikes on all these trailers, the game already seems poised to be the product of some culture war nonsense given its focus on a female lead that is not deemed sufficiently attractive by some, but it’s a created character game, and we’ll see if we can perhaps escape all this drama by launch.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.