Xbox has unveiled changes to their current business strategy during the latest episode of the Official Xbox Podcast on Thursday.
The event featured Head of Xbox Phil Spencer, President of Xbox Sarah Bond, and Head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty sitting down with co-host Tina Amini in what was billed as an “update on the Xbox business.”
The first big news shared by Phil Spencer is that as of right now four former Xbox console exclusive titles will be coming to “other consoles.” While which exact titles are unknown, Spencer said definitively that they are not Starfield or the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
Spencer continued by saying that the developers of these games will be working on their own individual announcements, and will make those statements when they are ready to do so.
The current Head of Xbox did give some further clues as to what these four games are, however. Spencer stated that when taking into consideration of which games to bring to other consoles, they looked at games that were over a year old, that were community-driven games, and were first iterations of a franchise that has the potential for growth.
Spencer went on to say that two of the titles were “smaller games that were never really meant to be built as kind of platform exclusives and all the fanfare that goes around that, but games that our teams really wanted to go build… [a]nd as they’ve realized their full potential on Xbox and PC, we see an opportunity to utilize the other platforms as a place to just drive more business value out of those games.”
Spencer closed this segment by reiterating that as of right now only these four games were coming to other consoles. “So if you’re on those other platforms and you see these four games coming, please don’t take it as some signal that everything’s coming. It’s not.”
Head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty then added that “[I]t used to be that the platform was the biggest thing, and the games would tuck in within the platform. Today, big games like a Roblox or a Fortnite could actually be bigger than any one platform. And that really has changed the way that we think about things.”
Booty used this to segue into discussion about the popular Game Pass feature that is currently only available on Xbox and PC platforms. He listed what he considers to be the three core principles of Xbox Game Studios: “First, that all of our games will be on the Xbox Platform. Second, all of our games will go into Game Pass on day one. And third, we know that Game Pass will only be available on Xbox.”
Booty continued to say that the biggest hindrances that keep Xbox from bringing more of their games to other platforms, as well as Game Pass, is cross-play and cross-saves. A major goal for Xbox is ensuring that players can have the same experience on whichever device that they choose to play on, and can smoothly take the game that they are playing on their home console with them on mobile and on PC devices.
Phil Spencer clarified that Xbox’s strategy isn’t really changing aside from bringing these four titles to other platforms. “[T]here’s really only two choices on how do you grow the industry: do you say, ‘I have a fixed number of players… and do I find new ways to monetize those players…?’ Or do you think about, ‘how do I expand the business I have by finding new players and adding those to the base of players that already play?’ … Xbox for the last decade has really been on that latter point.”
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Sarah Bond, President of Xbox, then chimed in, revealing that Diablo IV, one of the biggest titles to be acquired after Xbox’s successful purchase of Activision-Blizzard-King last year, will be coming to Game Pass on March 28.
Furthermore, Bond touted the success Xbox is having by stating that currently the platform has “the highest level of users on console, the highest level of users on PC, the highest level of users on cloud ever. We have double-digit growth rate on PC and cloud.”
Lastly, Bond gave a glimpse at the Xbox future generation console, claiming that Xbox is focused on “delivering the largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation, which makes it better for players and better for creators and the visions that they’re building.”
Speaking on backwards compatibility, Spencer went back to the roots of Microsoft as a whole. His philosophy comes from “looking at Windows, and how Windows, over decades, has maintained software compatibility with things that are built on it. Like, I can still go back and play some of the games that I love playing on Windows from decades ago and it will still run. And we try to bring that same view to consoles.”
The podcast closed with what the panelists believe the Xbox brand stands for today: “a platform that is dedicated to you–player-first features–cross-play, cross-save, cross-progression, backwards compatibility, being able to play your games in your library anywhere you want because of the investments that we make in cloud gaming.”
The full transcript and video of the podcast episodes can be found on the official Xbox website, located HERE.
What do you think of the latest Xbox podcast episode? Were you surprised by any of the statements made by Xbox leadership? Which four games do you believe will be making the jump to other consoles? Please let us know in the comments below, and on our official Discord server!
Source: Official Xbox Podcast
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