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Many games today are embracing the live service approach where new content is regularly added to keep things fresh, but Xbox isn’t making it a mandate for its developers to do this. Speaking to The Guardian, Xbox Studios boss Matt Booty said not every Xbox game needs to have a live service component, though many will.
“We don’t have any direction or mandate that says every game has to be an ongoing, sustained game,” he said.
Booty pointed to Double Fine’s Psychonauts series as an example. It’s not exactly the type of franchise one would associate with live service, and Booty expects that would continue if the series grows beyond Psychonauts 2. In fact, Booty said there is no expectation that Double Fine makes another game in that series at all.
“There might be a Psychonauts 3, but I’m not going to tell [designer] Tim Schafer to go make it. Knowing the history of games that he makes, I don’t think he’s going to be making a game that has seasons and goes on for five years,” Booty said.
One of the benefits of buying so many studios and franchises is that Microsoft can have its fingers in multiple pieces at the same time. While not every franchise from Xbox will be live service, some will, including Sea of Thieves and Halo Infinite.
“Sea of Thieves has longevity and we’re going to have Halo multiplayer start to be based around seasons, but [We Happy Few studio] Compulsion Games, our studio in Montreal, weren’t told to go build something that’s going to have seasons or six pieces of DLC or something. Tell Me Why was an important story for us to get out there, but there is no mandate that they’ve got to go figure out how to do seasons for that game,” Booty said.
Another trend that is increasingly popular in games today is scripting and user-generated content, and Booty said this is something that Xbox may lean into further in the future.
“With Forza Horizon 5, we added the ability to design challenges and obstacle courses. We’ve had Halo Forge, which lets you design your own multiplayer levels. In Flight Simulator, that activity is a lot more sophisticated,” he said. “So I think we’ll see that going forward, where people just have an expectation that they can do more through scripting and mods. And certainly, with the addition of Bethesda to the Xbox family, they’ve got a long history of understanding how mods work–we’ve seen that with Skyrim.”
Also in the interview, Xbox boss Phil Spencer discussed Xbox’s plans to extend its game development efforts to new markets, potentially including India, Africa, and South America.
