Xbox Game Studios Boss: A Single Team Working on a AAA Game Doesn't Happen Often Anymore - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 05 September 2022 / 1,991 Views
The head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty speaking in a Q&A at PAX West 2022 was asked if the pandemic played a role in the large number of video game delays over the last couple of years. He did say the pandemic played a part in it, however, he did say "how we make games is evolving."
How games are developed today are very different than they used to be, according to Booty. The majority of AAA games nowadays are developed by multiple teams.
"The idea of a single team under one roof really doesn’t happen that often anymore. I’ll use an example – our Perfect Dark team down in Santa Monica, The Initiative," said Booty via VideoGamesChronicle.
"So, we just did this big partnership with Crystal Dynamics, and I read online, ‘oh, this must mean there’s a problem or something’ – it’s quite the opposite, right? You’ve got this veteran team at Crystal Dynamics, a big AAA team with over 100 people that becomes available. Of course we want to work with them, particularly if they’ve made a game like that before.
"And that’s how we’ve done an awful lot of work. If you think about Age of Empires 4 which just launched last fall, that was made in partnership with Relic Studios up in Vancouver, great partnership. And even something like Flight Simulator, we worked with a studio in France called Asobo.
"And that kind of co-development, when you’re working out with people like Certain Affinity, Iron Galaxy, Blackbird [Interactive], all those studios are so key to the products that we make. That, though, also adds some complexity where if one of those studios has problems it then impacts the schedule.
"So the days are gone when you can sort of go ‘everybody, round up the team in the cafeteria, I want to tell everybody to work harder this Wednesday.’ That’s long gone, it’s gotten a lot more complicated than that."
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 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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The word AAA gets thrown around too much. There are plenty of smaller indie games made by a few developers that I would rather play than some of these big budget soulless games.
Whether or not you want to play a game, or think it's a worthwhile game to play, or has soul, or however you want to put it has nothing to do with whether or not a game is AAA.
While this is true, this reads like damage control for the controversy surrounding The Initiative.
Tell that to some of ninty and Sonys ip hahaha!
Xbox showing they really having a hard time cooking up something nice on their own
It would be great to release a game once in a while
Yeah but with so many studios they should be releasing them soon, I guess.
Obviously, its a shame they have to come out and say that.
That is why you were after ABK to have 5 or more teams working on the same game?
Having support team is good and they can be shared, but ABK having all their devs developing CoD for that 3 year rotation and the rest all doing CoD f2p? That isn't good imho.
Yep, and I do think MS purchase is going to help their move to make more IPs (even if not new IPs at first) than the ultra focus in CoD.
From memory (and I may be wrong) it was the 3 teams for main CoD rotation and all the others were support for the f2p CoD more than the mainline. But anyway if it turns to every 2 years for main one and they can streamline the f2p that will free a lot of resources. Hope they also do something similar on the Blizz side to make more room for new IPs instead of mostly supporting WoW.
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