Xbox Series X will have Microsoft’s ‘most diverse collection of first-party games’
Games that you can also play on Xbox One (and elsewhere)
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Halo Infinite:Xbox Series X will also launch with a major investment in game studios from Microsoft. Over the past two years, the company has added Ninja Theory, Obsidian Entertainment, Undead Labs, inXile Entertainment, and others to its internal stable. It spun up a new studio, The Initiative, to create something still unannounced. It also has the likes of Rare, 343 Industries, and Turn 10 Studios developing original and franchise games for Xbox and PC. The result of that growth is "the most diverse collection of first-party games that we've ever had," Spencer said.
Diversity In Games:"There's been a ton of learning in the studio around what does it mean to actually have a collection, the kind of totality of the Halo lore and stories and experience inside of one Halo world, one Halo UI, and platform," Spencer said. "As 343 has gone through this journey, they've seen some of the benefits of not requiring that our customers make a decision between 'Do I want to play this one or that one?' I feel like in a way, the games almost compete with each other. You see that with some of the annualized franchises that are out there — which clearly Halo's not annualized — but you see that where you spend a lot of energy actually trying to move the customers who are already playing your game to a new version of your game. I think as gaming has evolved, there's a view of 'Our customers are our customers and we should respect them where they are.' It's similar to our Xbox message, and I think you'll see that in terms of the way Infinite is talked about — even the structure of what the game is itself."
What's more, those games should represent not just a diversity of ideas, but the diversity of creators and a diversity of the audience that plays games, Booty said.
"We are also always on the lookout to try to build relationships with studios that are founded and run by people that are different than what we've had in the industry for the last couple of decades," Booty said. "I'm very proud of the fact that Minecraft is run by a woman, Helen Chiang. My particular leadership team of looking across the studios has got people like Bonnie Ross. It's got Shannon Loftis, running Age of Empires. You know Ninja Theory, founded by Nina [Kristensen]. ...
Everwild:"Obviously, there's more that we can do. I think you'll see some of the titles that we've got in our showcase coming up hopefully represent work that we're trying to do there to bring in different groups and really represent them with respect. And I think it's important that we do that, because that's how people will come into the industry, right? People that have maybe felt that the game industry is closed and not for them, they need to see themselves in the content, because that telegraphs that, 'Look, this is a place for you. We want your ideas. We want your voice. Come join us in making these games and not just playing them.'"
"I think we're definitely idea-first," Rare studio head Craig Duncan told Polygon. "We will bet and incubate and nurture the idea we think is great, and then we'll assume that all the business side of it will figure itself out as we go.
The Initiative:"We learned a lot from Sea of Thieves," Duncan said. "At its heart, we love the idea of Sea of Thieves [and] players creating stories together. I think with Everwild, Louise [O'Connor] and her leadership team are really passionate about giving players a world that they can just lose themselves in — you know, a lot of nature feels magical. So the notion of, 'What does it mean to nurture a world? What does it mean to be in nature?' Part of the reason we haven't talked a lot about Everwild is because we're still feeling a lot of these things out. We're still playing around with gameplay ideas. We'll have plenty to say in the future on that, but … we have an idea we feel really passionate about, and we think there's something special. I have a team of people that wake up every morning with the desire to make this game that they're really, really passionate about."
...Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty said, "I think people are going to be pretty excited when we start to talk about what's going on there."
"We've got things like Halo and Minecraft and Forza, Gears of War, Age of Empires, Flight Sim," Booty explained. "In many cases, these are franchises that are a decade or more established, which is fantastic. A big franchise like that comes with its own things that you can do. There's a lot of room within a big world to innovate on its own. But it's a separate thing when you think about how you manage that production. And then we've got some of the studios that we've acquired that came with their own culture. And when we think about — how are we going to keep ourselves from sitting still, and how are we going to kind of mix things up a little bit?
The Game Pass Effect:...We decided, let's try something new. We've got these big franchises. They sort of have their own way of doing something. We acquired some studios that came with their own culture. How do we start something from ground zero?"
...Spencer said Game Pass was built on a plan to "give us a larger creative canvas to build on," where not every game's success is measured by how many units it sells.
"We now have a platform that can really support us taking more creative risk," Spencer said. "I think absolutely there's an opportunity for us to do that with more franchises, whether it's ... kind of spinoff genres, or even revisiting things like Flight Sim, and bringing those back. They're actually part of the same lens for us of, 'What is it in our portfolio that we have? And what ideas would we either like to go back and revisit or experiment with more?'
"Game Pass really helps us do that, because you can look at something like [Gears Tactics], and say, 'Hey, could we make a turn-based strategy game out of Gears. What does the success metric look like for that?' Your normal process [is] some business people would go off and use Excel and tell you what the average selling number is for a PC turn-based strategy game. You say, 'OK, and we want to bring that to console.' So you kind of add those two numbers up and you evaluate it. But now we can say, 'Well wait a minute, we have over 10 million subscribers in the subscription. How many of those people will play and get retained and be a part of the subscription?' It really creates a different way for us to evaluate what games we go off and build, and allows us to do some things that frankly, we wouldn't go do if we were just driven by the retail dynamics of the industry."
"I don't think we want a portfolio of any one kind of game," Spencer said. "We want a breadth of offerings in the portfolio, which is why we've been investing in such a diverse slate of games and studios over the last couple of years. And one thing I really noticed on the [July] 23rd show, as I've been sitting back and watching the narrative unfold, is it's got to be the most diverse collection of first-party games that we've ever had, when I look at art style and size — I mean from some big, big, big teams and big, bombastic overtures to smaller, more bite-sized things — and I think that's our strength."
