.....And we said as much when we met Microsoft Studios boss Matt Booty, who was very keen to know what we thought of the Xbox conference. We outlined the above to him, but added that this year’s briefing felt like the sort of thing you would’ve expected the first year that Phil Spencer took over, rather than at the twilight end of the generation.
‘I think, right now, that we’re really at a high mark in the generation’, said Booty. ‘This fall, across all platforms and all consoles, is going to be just a crazy line-up of amazing game. Like, best time for gamers ever.’
‘I can’t really talk to decisions that Phil made, other than to say that right now it feels like we have, more than ever, the full support of Microsoft. It was just last fall that Phil was promoted to sit on our executive leadership team. As part of that, Xbox was elevated to sit next to big pillars like Windows, Office, Azure… these are big enterprise pillars of the company.
‘So we feel supported, we feel encourage to grow; I think we feel very empowered. It feels like it’s a new day now, it feels like we’ve got all the things coming together’.
But the lack of new IP is still one of many problems that Microsoft faces, especially given how good Sony has been at promoting brand new franchises through its own first party releases.
‘There’s two ways that we have to get new IP into our family’, says Booty. ‘The first is with our global publishing team, which often gets overlooked. But they’re part of Microsoft Studios and that is the team that works with world-class developers like Remedy, Sumo; that’s how Ori And The Blind Forest came about.
‘The goal there is that they will go out and find new IP. But it is very much one of the motivations for why we went out and sought out studios like Compulsion Games [We Happy Few] and Ninja Theory [Hellblade], it was their ability to create new IP, new games, new characters, new worlds…
And we have even taken that to the extreme, where with our new studio The Initiative, which is in Santa Monica, that is a blank piece of paper. We did not say, ‘Go make this kind of game, go make that’. We said, ‘We want you to build a team, we want you to build a studio, and once you’ve got that up and running let us know what you think would be a good game to make’. So we’re really hoping that becomes a great place for new IP to grow.’
It’s not just the promotion of new IP where Sony’s approach differs from Microsoft’s. Most of their first party games are single-player, narratively-driven adventures, whereas Microsoft has almost none. Even the way the two companies treat E3 is completely different, with Microsoft loathe to announce any game too far before release but Sony happy to start the hype years before anything is ready.
‘Our approach to the decisions we make is very much player-led’, says Booty. ‘We think about how do we connect the dots between the games we make and getting those games in the hands of the players. And that really informs everything. And if that turns out to be different than what some other folks are doing it’s coincidental.’
‘It’s just not how we think about it. That Halo video that we showed, the trailer, that was 100% generated by the 343 team. Nobody went to them and said, ‘We need you to make a video that shows this and shows that’.
But it’s not just that there are a lack of single-player-focused games on the Xbox One, but that Microsoft execs have openly complained about the
‘complicated’ economics of making single-player games and hinted that they are no longer as economically viable as they used to be, despite Sony proving otherwise.
‘Let’s acknowledge it: those games are doing great, and people love playing those games’, says Booty. ‘For us, and I want to be very careful to clarify this, we see both. We see people loving single-player games, and it’s why you can sit and work your way through Forza solo if that’s what you want to do. But we also know that more and more gaming is about community. More and more it’s about people playing together, and we’re gonna chase that. If that’s what our players are doing and where they want to go.’
‘But there is no overarching sentiment or strategy that says, ‘We’re gonna go make one kind of game over another’. In fact, with those studio acquisitions, with Ninja Theory, with Compulsion, if they end up deciding they want to make more games like Hellblade or We Happy Few – both primarily single-player games – if The Initiative comes back and says we want to make a game that doesn’t even have a multiplayer component, then great. We want the teams to make the games that they feel are right.
‘My job, as the leader of the studios organisation, is really to make sure that the information and the thinking of the games is coming from the bottom up; from the studios back to the executives, not as some kind of mandate from the executives out to the studios.’
https://metro.co.uk/2018/06/15/xbox-...8/?ito=cbshare