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Tim Schafer:
Matt Booty on how GP fits in and growth:
Can 343i, The Coalition or Turn10 make something different? Answer below!
Tons more a the link:
Tim Schafer:
"Because of Game Pass, I can see where we fit in," says Tim Schafer, studio head of Double Fine, which Xbox acquired in 2019. "There are not a lot of studios making brightly coloured, funny, family-friendly games. Well, we try to be funny."
He continues: "It does make me think about some of the crazy game ideas we've had, and some of them you're just like... I can never pitch this to any publisher. I would never get this signed. But I am now opening up that folder of documents again, and going 'oh I really love this idea, I bet I could do that now'."
Matt Booty on how GP fits in and growth:
"But with things like Game Pass and the studios we've brought in during the last year, it's all still fairly new. We're still in the growth phase and seeing how this all works. As the idea of Game Pass matures, and as our studio system matures, then we might start to think about... is there a certain type of game that we need to have more of an investment in? That's a growth phase kind-of thing. But right now, I feel really good about optimising for diversity of content. That's what we've really gone after. And we're only able to really do that because we have ID@Xbox bringing in so many good titles, and our third-party team working with the big publishers. The matrix of all of that makes it work."
Can 343i, The Coalition or Turn10 make something different? Answer below!
A lot of the diverse games that Booty and Spencer is talking about are expected to come from the newly acquired studios, which have a remit to do different things. But what about some of the more established studios? The ones responsible for the big franchises like Halo, Gears, Forza, Minecraft and Age of Empires? Could The Coalition, which has spent its life making Gears of War games, suddenly decide to make a kids platformer?
Booty laughs: "If they decided that's what they wanted to do, we'd certainly have the conversation. But one of the things about our bigger franchises, is that there's a lot of room to experiment within those franchises. I look at something like Halo, and it's starts with a universe, a fiction, and there's so many different types of things that we can do around that. If we look at Gears of War... it's funny, you mention a kids platformer, now we didn't quite make a kids platformer, but I look at what we did with the Gears Pop! game, and that was thinking about ways we can bring in other audiences.
"I get where you're coming from. But for me, I see those things as a little like Star Wars, right? Oh, I've got to go work on Star Wars. What else is there to do? But they've got things like The Mandalorian and Clone Wars. If you've got a rich universe, you just have a lot of surface area that you can just go out and explore."
Tons more a the link:
Developing for Xbox Game Pass: "I could never pitch these ideas to a publisher"
This is part of a series of features with Xbox Game Studios. Check out the teams discuss life as a Microsoft-owned comp…
www.gamesindustry.biz
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