Next month, fans of last December’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are getting a big treat: a new DLC, The Order of Giants, dropping on Sept. 4, detailed this week with a launch trailer out of Gamescom.
There’s nothing unusual about the timeline for what sounds like a substantial new adventure for Indiana Jones, one that whisks the archaeologist back to Rome to uncover more about the mystical Nephilim Order. A worthy DLC can arrive a few months after release (see: Remedy launching Alan Wake 2 in October 2023, then following up with the Night Springs expansion in June 2024) or years later in the case of Starfield: Shattered Space, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, or Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty.
But Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has had a more fascinating trajectory than most of its AAA DLC-packing predecessors. Shortly before arriving in December 2024 to Xbox and Game Pass, Microsoft announced that the MachineGames title would go multi-platform. The game hit PS5 in April 2025; a Switch 2 version is planned for 2026. The DLC adds another blip on the 2025 timeline.
Omnipresence seems great for visibility, but rarely acclaim. Which is why The Order of Giants has me thinking of… FX’s The Bear. Stay with me.
For all the glowing Great Circle reviews, there was one consistent nitpicky complaint from both critics and players when it dropped: If only we had played this in time to name it Game of the Year! Microsoft’s decision to release the game on Dec. 9, where it made a huge splash on Game Pass in an empty pond of new releases, meant that most game critics didn’t consider it for GOTY lists. In fact, The Game Awards’ own voting window concludes in November, leaving December releases in consideration for the following year. Meaning, Great Circle still has a chance this year… if anyone voting remembers that it has a chance this year. (Polygon’s consideration window works on a similar timeline, and you’re sure to see Great Circle on our 2025 list in December.)
Technically, The Order of Giants is also a 2025 Game of the Year contender for many outlets and at The Game Awards, which clarified its voting process last year to allow Shadow of the Erdtree — and any DLC — to be GOTY eligible. But more likely than not, any ballot-caster will consider the totality of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, main game and expansions, when considering its ranking. Dropping The Order of Giants in September just gives it a much-needed bump amidst a competitive season.
Is the DLC timing that calculated? Considering that Xbox Game Studios lead Matt Booty has said that a service like Game Pass needs “awards” to fuel its allure and success (not to mention Xbox’s power as a cross-platform publisher), it certainly feels strategic — and is much more common in other media landscapes. This is where, in my eyes, Microsoft has taken a page out of Disney, Hulu, and FX’s Emmys playbook for The Bear.
The restaurant-biz “comedy”, which saw its fourth season drop on Hulu this past June, has been an awards favorite since it premiered in 2022. This is in large part due to its quality — whatever you think of the laugh-per-minute ratio, the story is gripping, the cast is a generational get, and the style is visceral — but a little part due to dropping the show at the exact right moment, when trailers and hype can converge into a For Your Consideration campaign for the previous season.
To better understand this clever Emmys ploy, I asked my longtime friend and The Ankler awards columnist Katey Rich to explain How The Bear Got Here. Here’s what she wrote back to me:
When season 1 of The Bear first premiered in June of 2022, it felt like summer counterprogramming, like a perfect low-stakes place to drop a show that was a little bit experimental. They’ve stuck with that release slot ever since, but now it feels very canny, airing immediately after Emmy ballots are cast but before the nominations are announced. The result for season 2 and 3 was that everyone was still talking about the best episodes of the new season — Richie’s big arc in “Forks,” the nightmare Christmas episode “Fishes,” Tina’s backstory episode “Napkins” — just as Emmy voters were sitting down to vote on the previous season. The effect was that Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Liza Colon-Zayas basically won Emmys for episodes from the season they weren’t even nominated for yet. It’s a weird use of the calendar, but it works.
Few shows work on that kind of rigorous release schedule that The Bear does, so it’s tough for other shows to emulate. But just as Hacks is now expected to be a May show, The Bear now has late June to itself. It had some competition this year from The Gilded Age, which launched in early June, and might suggest that other networks are willing to test out the same strategy.
Like The Bear, very few games are in a position to actually pull off this stunt, especially the much-discussed frontrunners of 2025. Sources tell Polygon not to expect any surprise updates from the folks behind Clair Obscur, who are just thrilled to see a big gamble pay off. Donkey Kong Bananza and Death Stranding 2 are likely complete packages — at least through this calendar year. Same with Blue Prince, which asks players to revel in the repetition of its experience. Narrative-driven and easier to build upon in terms of character performances and missions, plans for an Indiana Jones DLC were already being discussed pre-launch in the fall of 2024. Like a new season of a hit TV show, it was kind of a given. Microsoft is wisely weaponizing the goods.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle doesn’t need a Game of the Year award from any publication or awards show to be one of the great games of 2024, or 2025, or 2026, when it eventually comes to Switch 2. But in a time of Too Many Games, a title that still needs to sell across consoles, and give Game Pass the right allure, needs to break through. A great DLC can do that. A great DLC positioned just when GOTY voters need a reminder that the core game is great does it even better.
