Xbox Game Studios To Release New Exclusive Every Three Months
Paolo Sirio
In an interview with IGN, head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty has revealed that the team plans on dropping new exclusives for Xbox One/Project Scarlett and Windows 10 PC every three months. Of course, this is taking into account the timeframe when all the teams will be lined up and ready to kick off their work as first-party studios.
Booty has shared that he believes that games from Double Fine Productions and Ninja Theory usually take from two to four years, with an average of development time of three years, which makes for good timing in order to reach that target of one game every three months on Xbox Game Pass.
“I think about like how long you spend with a game and just sort of the cadence of discovery there. So if you can do a game every three months, and if a game takes somewhere between two years and four years, I mean, just think about things that have come out recently, you know, things like Red Dead and God of War need to be getting into five, six years. Right? But let’s just say for the sorts of studios, like a Ninja Theory or a Double Fine that two, three years starts to be the cadence, right?,” Booty said.
“So, then if you’ve got a game a quarter and you’re taking two to three years. You can kind of back into the math and say, well wow, you probably need somewhere between 10 and 12 studios. But… making games is not yet a perfect science, right? There’s no creative endeavor that is. So there’s going to be things that take longer. There’s going to be some things that we start and say, hey, great idea, but it just isn’t, you know, the Jello doesn’t want to set. Right. Um, and so I think we need some, some buffer in there, right? So the first, that’s kind of my basic answers.”
He ended his talk about the amount of games required in a certain time span by saying that “we’d love to be feeding a high-quality game into game pass about every three months,” which is a realistic target from the looks of it, with 15 developers now involved in the Xbox Game Studios for Windows 10 and Xbox.
E3 2019 has not been very rich in terms of new exclusives, as Microsoft’s teams have only revealed the new IP Bleeding Edge, and more titles are coming from the new studios, but they’re multiformat, such as The Outer Worlds and Psychonauts 2, coming on Xbox Game Pass upon day one.
Source: IGN
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