The Xbox Game Studios’ head believes that “a lot of games” will be released this year on Xbox One.
The original Xbox was around for around 11 years, and it was the beginning of a new era for Microsoft. The console became synonymous with first-party games, and was the main reason the Xbox brand became a household name, in addition to being the first time Microsoft had a first-party hardware product.
Xbox Game Studios has changed its strategy on many fronts in recent years, from bringing more games to PC to entering the subscription service market with Xbox Game Pass. It has also made numerous acquisitions, including Bethesda’s parent company, Zenimax Media.
The company is clearly looking to diversify its portfolio, perhaps beyond developer acquisitions, and we could see more features supporting user-generated content in the future.
Some Xbox Games Studios games, such as Forza Horizon 5 and Microsoft Flight Simulator, already encourage user-generated content to some extent, and that number could increase significantly in the coming years.
I think we will see scripting-based things in many games and the ability to extend the game, Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty told The Guardian. In Forza Horizon 5, we’ve added the ability to create challenges and obstacle courses. We had Halo Forge, which allowed us to create our own multiplayer levels. In the flight simulator, this activity is much more complex.
So I think we’ll see that in the future, when people expect to be able to do more with scripts and mods. And of course, with the addition to the Xbox family, Bethesda has a long history of understanding how mods work – we saw it in Skyrim. Prey explained.
Executive vice president of games Phil Spencer confirmed this, saying that Microsoft has been a creativity-focused company from the beginning.
I mean, under DOS anyone could make an application – you were the game editor if you had a compiler and a floppy drive. You just made your game, copied it to a floppy disk, packed it in a Ziploc and sold it; you are the publisher of the game. I love that kind of access and want to go back to that as an industry.
User-generated content can be very useful and extend the life of the game, even if there are no mods. With the advent of action games, an area Xbox Game Studios is no stranger to, things can look bleak at first glance. This is largely due to the fact that developers control the content that goes into the game, with or without money, leaving little room for players to create their own content.
Booty notes, however, that it is not ‘s policy or mandate that a game must be a continuous, ongoing game.
Sea of Thieves has a long life, and we’re going to make Halo multiplayer based on seasons, but Compulsion Games, our studio in Montreal, wasn’t tasked with making anything that will have seasons or six games of DLC or anything like that.
We’ll have to wait and see how this plays out over the next few years, but it seems like a welcome change in direction, at least from a player’s perspective.
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