Microsoft: We Love Single-Player Games With 20 to 30 Hours of Gameplay
Paolo Sirio
Matt Booty, the new boss at Microsoft Studios, has provided more details about his and his company’s vision for what matters gaming and the video games development, especially when it comes to the single-player experiences.
Booty, who was in charge of the Minecraft franchise before embarking on this new quest, doesn’t have a much different vision in comparison with what Microsoft has done thus far on Xbox One.
It’s a vision about persistent experiences that have a lot of longevity, can be shared and streamed all over the multiple platforms owned by the publisher. Something that we’ve seen recently applied in Sea of Thieves and State of Decay 2.
“There will always be single-player games with maybe 20 to 30 hours of gameplay, we love those kinds of games and there’s a place for those, but it’s also certainly the case with the focus on watching, streaming, broadcast and esports that it’s really important to think about the longevity of a game,” Booty told MCV.
“It’s really difficult for anybody to think about making a large scale triple-A game these days without having in mind a content and service plan that goes one to two years into the future out of the gate.”
“Games really have become much more social, much more mainstream, much more widespread. We know that the games industry is growing, and that’s taking nothing away from what you call the ‘single-player, narrative, cinematic game’ but we see a lot of interest from our players in more community-driven ongoing franchises. I think that is in alignment with a lot of the trends we see in gaming overall.”
“With games being as large as they are, with the move to games as an ongoing service…It is difficult to pivot quickly and try to chase after trends that might happen even on the scale of a year. In business terms a year can be a long time, but development time being three to four years these days, that’s the span we need to think about.”
“We’ve got to get our strategic long-term bets, our game development cycles and the things our players like to do in sync. And that will set us up for success”.
E3 2018 is just around the corner and this occasion, Xbox users and supporters hope, will be the one to help the console shift its focus on historical single-player franchises and more new intellectual properties.
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