In a new podcast from Variety, “Strictly Business“, Xbox President of Gaming Content and Studios Matt Booty shared his thoughts on the changes ahead for the gaming industry.
It’s no secret that Xbox has seen some success in porting previously exclusive games to traditionally rival platforms, with Sea of Thieves being the highest selling game on PlayStation in May of 2024.
“We’ve been really pleased with what we’ve seen on Sea of Thieves” says Matt during the podcast, ” – just in terms of some things that I can share that were encouraging to us is that when we launched Sea of Thieves on PlayStation 5, we saw an uptick in engagement on Xbox and on PC. So again, there’s this thing where you’ve got more people coming in to the franchise, which causes more excitement, which actually grows the franchise overall – and if you want to be really direct about it, from a business point of view, allows us to continue to reinvest in that franchise and continue to grow it.”
“It’s one of the things that’s core to our Xbox promise; letting people play where they want to play, with the people that want to play with, on the devices they play with, and it’s encouraging that we didn’t see sort of a vertically insulated community there – that the work that the team had put in to being best-in-class, in terms of cross-platform play, really paid off, because we saw people engaging outside of their own device ecosystem, which was great.
“The other thing is it brough new players into Sea of Thieves, right? One of the real goals that all of our franchises have, and one that we all have across the industry right now is – ‘how do we grow’? And, that was really great to see that it was bringing in new players that had never played Sea of Thieves before. I think we consider that a success!”
It was here Matt spoke about the bigger picture – the strategy ahead for Xbox and just what it’s plans are – fans hoping for absolute transparency may be disappointed, as Xbox are seemingly treating exclusivity as a case by case issue going forward.
We are absolutely committed to having launch exclusives on Xbox – it’s part of our core promise.
“We will continue to make those decisions individually on a case-by-case basis; we are absolutely committed to having launch exclusives on Xbox – it’s part of our core promise – and we want to continue to bring our games to more players on more devices going forward. And we certainly have got a lot of experience with that with things that have just historically been multiplatform for so long.“
When asked by the podcast host what it’s like working with Sony and Nintendo, and whether Matt sees the “walls breaking down a little bit”, Matt responded:
“Yeah, well, obviously I can’t speak on behalf of Sony or Nintendo, but I’ll say that in each case we have great working relationships with the teams at Sony and Nintendo. Again, our portfolio consists of games that have shipped on those platforms for 10-15 years – that doesn’t happen without a great partnership with them – we’ve got a great working relationship.“
Matt Booty continues, “I think that as you point out, as gaming becomes a bigger part of pop culture, as the number of gamers on the planet hits 2 billion, 3 billion and continues to grow that it’s inevitable that we’re gonna see that content sort of seeks to be everywhere, right? That we’re going to see some blending across the boundaries and the differences that maybe have existed historically.”
“For us, it really comes down to maintaining that player first focus, right? We want to be where the players are. A device, the Xbox, will always be core to what we do. The console is foundational to what we do, but y’know, going all the way back to 2016, 2017, when we started supporting, started shipping all of our games day and date on PC; when we started branching out into things like cloud streaming which allows you to really take your game anywhere. Focusing on making sure we get things right.“
Matt Booty spends some further time talking about the friction for modern games, and what Xbox are doing to solve it – cloud saves that follow your profile was given as an example. In closing, Matt remarked on the future of the industry.
“What the future holds for those trends, I don’t really have that crystal ball, but I do know that we’re going to continue to follow our fans, follow our players where they want to be. And, as gaming grows to be something that is right there side by side with more traditional entertainment like music, movies and TV, we’ll probably see some of the same things start to happen in gaming that you’ve seen over the last 10 years in linear media.”
What do you think about Matt Booty’s comments? Let us know in the comments below!
Long term relationships for 10-15 years. That’s really stretching it. The companies YOU ACQUIRED had good relationships with Sony and Nintendo. You have to differentiate where those companies were pre-Microsoft acquisition so, I would ignore that part…..