Last weekend was the big video game kickoff into Summer with a multitude of different press conferences giving players a glimpse into the next few years of gaming. One of the more impressive events was the Xbox Games Showcase where Microsoft and Team Xbox revealed lots of new titles both first-party and third-party coming to the platform. Head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty talked with the Hollywood Reporter about that as well as the big push in video game adaptations, Xbox’s interest in VR/AR and more.
The biggest thing that every gamer was probably looking forward to with the Xbox Games Showcase was what came afterward, the Starfield Direct where Bethesda Game Studios went all in detailing all of the upcoming game’s different aspects. One question that came out in the interview was whether or not there is a Starfield adaptation in the works. “I don’t have anything to share around there on Starfield, but I love your point that the worlds that we create in games, the characters that we create … people build entire digital hobbies around and invest hundreds of hours in [them], so it’s cool to see linear media, as we call it, recognize that,” Booty said.
He also went on to discuss the differences between game development and the development of a movie or television series. Booty believes that it’s better for games to prove that they have the capacity to transition into another medium. And when it comes to the creation of games and tv/movies, they work opposite from each other. “One of the things about games that’s a little bit different from movies and TV is that we do all of our iteration mostly at the end,” Booty said. “If you think about a movie or a TV series, so much happens with the script and treatment, and it’s all done up front, and by the time you’re shooting on stage, you pretty much know what you’re making. Games are very different in that we have to build so much before we even know what we’ve got and before we can start iterating, and so I think our teams just want to make sure that first and foremost, we’ve built a great game, that we’ve found something that resonates with game players. And then that gives us permission to then go and explore, does that IP or is that franchise capable of going on [to be a film or TV show]?”
Booty also talked about how marketing and producing games have changed now that more and more traditional Hollywood talent have done roles in video games like Keanu Reeves and Idris Elba in Cyberpunk 2077. Booty said “Anytime we’ve got a high-profile character in a game, somebody that could have voice acting or even a likeness, we certainly spend a lot of time looking at those possibilities. We don’t have a prescribed approach to that. The studios have a lot of creative freedom to go pursue what they want to do there in terms of how they bring licensed music into the game, how they bring celebrities into the game, how they bring actors into the game, known or unknown. It’s really up to them in the creative process.”
PlayStation has invested heavily into VR but Xbox hasn’t. According to Booty, it comes down to the lack of an audience there. “I think for us, it’s just a bit of wait until there’s an audience there. We’re very fortunate that we have got these big IPs that have turned into ongoing franchises with big communities. We have 10 games that have achieved over 10 million players life-to-date, which is a pretty big accomplishment, but that’s the kind of scale that we need to see success for the game and it’s just, it’s not quite there yet with AR, VR.”
The interview also went into Cloud gaming and how Microsoft and Xbox sees that going in the future. “For us, to be clear, it is a very, very small market,” Booty said. “I’m not even sure you would call it a market yet, in fact. It’s very small usage and very small audience.”
“We’ve got 150 million active players across first-party [games] every month. It’s just not even at that scale. So for us, it’s something that we consider almost more experimental that we’re trying out to see how it works. We just announced it. We’ve signed some great partnerships with NVIDIA and announced some other partnerships. So for us, it comes back to the content, which is really my focus.”
“My teams have done an awful lot to make sure that we support touch interface and touch first so [the games] can be played on touch-first devices. But again, that content that we’re streaming is our frontline content. We’re not building anything specific for that. I think there’s still a lot of economic issues to work out in terms of the cost as well. So in a weird way, it ties back a bit to your AR/VR question, and it’s something that we feel we need to be up on being involved with the technology. We have some great partners that we’re giving our content to, but for me, it comes back to the content and focusing on things that have scale.”
“There’s a lot of things that can be done when your game knows that there is a central server that’s running in a bigger cloud, there’s gameplay things you could explore,” Booty said. “That’s a little bit of our job as first party is to think about what are some of those forward-looking, experimental things we could do with cloud, but to me, that has more to do with what are the kinds of games you could make if you knew you had access to a lot of computing power that was off of your computer, off a console, as opposed to just a streaming scenario. Those are things that we’re looking at, but I think it’s a broader definition of what cloud gaming can be.”