Xbox Studio Boss Matt Booty talks Halo, Starfield and Xbox in 2023 | Friends Per Second Episode 11

[Lord Mittens]

TLDW: Stolen from the other side.

1. Grounded was played by 13 mil players.
2. Coalitions helps Undead Lab with animation for State of Decay 3
3. Obsidian's Pentiment has happen because Gamepass and it's entirely Josh Sawyer idea and the team chance to get more heavy projects in the future;
4. Negative sides of Gamepass in Matt Booty's opinion: game design is inherently tied to business model
5. Halo Infinite had in December 2021 a peak of 20 mil players playing the game.
6. Bigger the team working on a game, harder to ship it.
7. Halo Infinite plan to give content fell short and he recognize it
8. 343 leadership and team changed and refocused to sustain content release and regular updates
9. Crystal Dynamics was brought to co-develop as equal partner the Perfect Dark game because the creation of a new studio and developing a new AAA game at the same time was not as feasible as they thought.
10. Crystal Dynamics had ~100 people available not working on a game and was a perfect match for helping The Initiative to do Perfect Dark.
11. Playground Games pitch Fable and they were given credit due to their technology base and high quality work till now.
12. inExile new game impressed the other studio from MS when was showed a demo on their meetings.
13. Starfield is more than Skyrim in space and he calls the art style "Nasapunk";
14. Forza Motorsport is gonna blow people away;
15. Not confirmed, but Redfall might come before Starfield.

 

[Gediminas]

How about other 15+ studios? Vaporware?

 

[IntentionalPun]

Negative sides of Gamepass in Matt Booty's opinion: game design is inherently tied to business model

Curious do you have a timestamp on when this was said?

That's the most interesting bullet point here to me and I'd like to hear more.

 

[Lord Mittens]

Curious do you have a timestamp on when this was said?

That's the most interesting bullet point here to me and I'd like to hear more.

Here you go

 

[peter42O]

All sounds good to me. Really looking forward to seeing what InXile is working on and very happy to hear that they want State of Decay 3 to be a big visual improvement and focus on animations is great because after SOD 2, these are the two aspects that need the most work.

 

[Vertigo]

Halo Infinite had in December 2021 a peak of 20 mil players playing the game.

Huge fucking lie

 

[Yobo]

Xbox leadership on the damage control circuit

 

[Dick Jones]

Huge fucking lie

Nadella stated that it had 20m players after the first month. He cannot mislead on that.

Cumulative yes,
Peak of 20m players
Press X to doubt

 

[Vertigo]

Right so what they’re really saying it that it peaked in its launch month with 20 million cumulative and then what? Lost 99.99998% of its players?? So what was the peak monthly player count for last month? 150k maybe? I’m sure it’s absolutely pitiful.

What a fucking hack booty is. His PR spin game is trash. These Xbox managers are a bunch of spineless salesmen

 

[arvfab]

Negative sides of Gamepass in Matt Booty's opinion: game design is inherently tied to business model

Ah yes, right from the horse's mouth. Yet people saying it from the beginning were laughed off for concerned trolling....

 

[Dabaus]

Ah yes, right from the horse's mouth. Yet people saying it from the beginning were laughed off for concerned trolling....

This is a great point. Every legitimate concern about xbox and their business model was disregarded as concern trolling or "dont worry about it bro microsoft WANTS to waste money on xbox." Well, theyre trying to spend at least 100 billion on a failing division and thanks to the stock market have lost over a trillion dollars in value. At some point something has to give.

 

[laynelane]

If Game Pass continues to not meet its targets, I hope they'll seriously look at point 4. This is something a lot of us have expressed worries about for a long time now.

 

[ethomaz]

Negative sides of Gamepass in Matt Booty's opinion: game design is inherently tied to business model

No shit Sherlock.

We are saying that since subscription and GAAS become a thing in the game industry.

The game design to sell millions to gamers at $60 is different to make millions to continue subscribing to a monthly $10 plan.

Quality is different too because in the first case you have the revenue right at opening to cover all the costs while the second case you have rely in the monthly royalties based in playing % + minor upfront payment and that can take years to pay you costs… so you decrease your scale and quality and focus in constant minor updates to keep people playing your game.

 

[bxrz]

No shit Sherlock.

We are saying that since subscription and GAAS become a thing in the game industry.

The game design to sell millions to gamers at $60 is different to make millions to continue subscribing to a monthly $10 plan.

Quality is different too because in the first case you have the revenue right at opening to cover all the costs while the second case you have rely in the monthly royalties based in playing % + minor upfront payment and that can take years to pay you costs… so you decrease your scale and quality and focus in constant minor updates to keep people playing your game.

Thats only if you make a GaaS game, which not every Xbox studio is making.

 

[arvfab]

Thats only if you make a GaaS game, which not every Xbox studio is making.

Well yes, with the current development times at MS studios, the Gamepass-tailored games won't be out anytime soon. Some of their announced games started development long before GP was a thing or under studios they didn't buy until a few years ago.

Additionally, GaaS isn't the only way to fill GP. Look at Pentiment, for example. Episodic games could be an alternative. Shorter games of "budget" quality.

 

[Vertigo]

Nah, gamespass cannot sustain gaas. That would mean having the base game as free with gamespass and monetizing further content drops as separate purchases with the hope that gamespass actually brought them players. So far they’re only doing that with Forza Horizon eh? And expansion is paid for only. No gamespass.

To be honest, the monthly sub is not enough in any form to even support a single gaas, let alone the 600 games they have on there that they share entry price with.

This plan isn’t working out as well as they hoped huh

 

[DonFerrari]

Ah yes, right from the horse's mouth. Yet people saying it from the beginning were laughed off for concerned trolling....

Because the people saying it from the beginning are claiming that all Xbox games are going to be small filler type games or MTX infested GaaS.

Also if you listen to the interview, he doesn’t tie the answer to GamePass at all. He says the business model of every game is tied to the initial design of the game and he’s obviously right. We also know that MS doesn’t expect GamePass to ever be close to a majority of their revenue, not even 20%.

So they are going to completely change the design of their games for GamePass and ignore the larger portion of their audience who buys games?

 

[arvfab]

So they are going to completely change the design of their games for GamePass and ignore the larger portion of their audience who buys games?

Going by sales numbers, their audience is starting to buy less and less games, waiting for them to come to Gamepass....

It's also ironic that out of the very few games they have released so far, you have 3 GaaS games (Forza, Flight Sim and Halo) or smaller budget games (Psychonauts, Grounded and Pentiment).

 

[DonFerrari]

The only GaaS aspect of Halo is the MP, which is also F2P and doesn’t need GamePass. The campaign is great.

Forza has had monetization long before GamePass, as has MFS. That’s like me saying GT7 is GaaS because of PS++ or whatever it’s called.

 

[Kokoloko]

Eventually they are gonna have some good hits. Ninja Theory is great and if they acquire Activision they’ll have even more studions. But the management is awful