How Game Pass is transforming Xbox

November 17th, 2019, 21:04 Posted By: wraggster

There are a lot of Xbox games in the works.
Halo, Ori, Age of Empires, Flight Simulator, Bleeding Edge, Battletoads, Everwild, Tell Me Why, Gears Tactics, Grounded... and there's more to be announced. Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, tells us that they'll be further reveals before Christmas and even more in early 2020.
"You will see one of the most exciting line-ups that we've had coming from Xbox Game Studios in as long as I can remember," he says confidently. "For the first time ever, we really have way more games than we know what to do with in terms of knowing when they'll be announced."
The reason behind this flurry of game activity is due to the number of new studios the company has acquired as it looks to strengthen its Game Pass subscription offering. Some of these studios are not what you'd describe as AAA developers, and in fact many of the games we listed above are smaller, more unusual offerings. Take the survival game Grounded, which is an Obsidian title but one developed by just 14 people.
Some of the titles seem quite risky, but Microsoft says that Game Pass eliminates some of that risk. There's no longer that worry whether gamers will be willing to spend $60 on a new title, and so the commercial pressures are reduced when choosing whether to commission something or not.
"Yeah. In general [that's true]," Booty tells us. "I'd just want to use a different word than commission. Our studios are very creator-led. But honestly, especially where we are right now, we have a very unique advantage that so many of our studio heads are very senior, very experienced, and very creator-led. We're really trying to stay out of the way and let them make the games that they want to make. And so it's for them to say: 'Hey, when I look at Game Pass, this is what I see'. They might see a game that can bring a bigger audience than they had before, or they see the ability to make a game that might be more built around community, because they know that the second that it goes into Game Pass they have this ready-made community of players. But that's really up for them to figure out."

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl...nsforming-xbox

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