Head of Xbox Game Studios Discusses How Game Pass is Transforming Xbox - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 04 March 2020 / 2,728 Views
Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, speaking with GamesIndustry discussed the importance of Game Pass and how it is transforming the Xbox.
Booty says Game Pass is enabling developers to ignore the traditional business models. There is no need to have enough content to justify the $60 price tag or worry about generating enough revenue through microtransactions.
"Game Pass itself takes care of being the service and the platform so when we go to design a game, we don't need to be thinking about what our plan is to sustain this for three or four years," Booty said. "We don't need to think about how we come up with a set of content updates so that this thing can run as a service, or whether we're going to be doing Fortnite-style updates every three weeks. It frees us from having to think about that.
"It allows our game creators to do what they do best, which is make a game. Whether that's Outer Worlds, where it's a standalone single-player game that's about 25 hours long, or a game like Bleeding Edge, which probably structurally looks closer to a free-to-play game. It has really freed us up from having to think about designing around a service or around a business model and being able to just design the games that the team wants to make."
Microsoft wants Game Pass to have a high standard and not be full of half finished or poor quality games, according to Booty. The goal with Game Pass right now is to build the userbase up similar to how Netflix did with cheap promotions.
"Right now, quality and curation is so important to us," he says. "I don't want Game Pass to become the place where half-finished or lower-quality games end up. Given some of the challenges we've had with some things coming out of Xbox Game Studios that may not have been at the quality level that we'd want, I think for the time being we're going to stay very focused on improving our execution and the quality of games that we make."
"What's important to understand is that we are 18 months in on Game Pass," added Booty. "Netflix is over ten years old. If you were to go back and look at some of the things that Netflix did in their first two years, it's easy for people to forget now because it's been so long, but you couldn't turn around sideways without seeing a Netflix ad for this promotional offer, or that promotional offer... It was almost as bad as the AOL disk. I'd go pick up my chicken sandwich at the restaurant and it comes with a free AOL disk. Everything was about a free month of Netflix.
"I think that as a subscription service emerges and grows that there are different ways of promoting it at different times. We're just in a different phase. They have challenges that are different from what we have right now. There's so much talk about Disney Plus and they've got a world of challenges there. For us, we need to do the right marketing from where we are in the lifecycle of our subscription."
Booty said that they feel confident in their upcoming games that announcing two new games at X019 that will launch for the Xbox One will not affect the lineup of Xbox on the Xbox Scarlett.
"We feel confident about our content pipeline so that we feel we don't need to save everything up for that beat," said Booty. "But what I'll also say is that today, when you launch a new device you are not eliminating all of the devices in that family to date. If I make a game for the iPhone, when the iPhone X comes out I can't just write it for the iPhone X and pretend as if the 9, 8, 7 and 6 don't exist.
"When Scarlett launches, there will still be the Xbox One S and Xbox One X out there. We really need to approach that family of devices in the same way that we approach PC, where the content scales to meet the device. That's going to be the case for anybody. It's not like, if we roll back the clock 15 years, when a new device was out and people wanted you to take your old device and just put it in the closet.
"We will absolutely lean in on the power of Scarlett. We think it's going to be the best way to play and it'll be the best thing to put in your living room. But we also want to understand that there will be a family of Xbox devices out there that we want to make sure we support fully."
Microsoft's next generation console, codenamed Xbox Scarlett, will launch in Holiday 2020.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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They keep saying and doing the right things. I hope they continue. Gamepass really is shaping up to be great.
I think the Gamepass is good for some ne Gamers but if you have a lot of games it gets more uninteresting
Netflix is 12b in debt...
All it is, is MS's attempt at all digital service. Plain and simple.
That a bad thing? Steam is all digital and its by far the best platform to game on.
Its more like a Netflix, Hulu, Amzon, HBO, etc. They fund content with subscriptions.
It's a good service though. Gamepass really is Netflix for games. @Azzanation Steam isn't a platform. It's a store. A platform is something that can run games. Steam by itself cannot run games. It needs computer hardware and drivers for that. PC as a platform is great, but has it's fair share of flaws, same as the other platforms out there. The marketplace for games is fragmented on PC. There's no option for physical copies. Getting a good gaming PC running smoothly is a lot of work. Lots of drivers, settings, and googling to do. Lots of games still don't launch day and date on PC, or come with crippling DRM like Denuvo. This is coming from someone that just built a 2K rig.
IMO PC is for multiplats, CRPGs, RTS, 4X, and online games. PS4 is for Sony exclusives, games that are DRM'd to death on PC, and games that come to consoles first. Switch is for Nintendo exclusives, Indies on the go, and any games that come to it running within 90% the same as other platform versions.
