In an interview with The Guardian, Head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty discusses the environment surrounding XGS and whether there is groupthink amongst the studios on how to make games. Booty states “We don’t have any direction or mandate that says every game has to be an ongoing, sustained game.”
He goes on to say that “Sea of Thieves has longevity and we’re going to have Halo multiplayer start to be based around seasons, but 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”
In these quotes, Matt Booty is refuting any notion that Xbox is mandating each of their studios create an ongoing game. An ongoing game refers to any game that sees continuing support and content drops after launch, like a Fortnite, Warzone, Destiny, etc.
There has been some trepidation that with Xbox Game Pass, Xbox Game Studios as a whole would transition to the model of making every game continuous. But it is clear that these teams are able to make what they want to make, with no mandate on the specific type of game or how it is supported after launch.
