Xbox Game Studios Head Says Company Wants to Be More ‘Disciplined’ About Managing Expectations

In the rooftop lounge above the Novo Theater following the Xbox Games Showcase yesterday, the mood is upbeat. Not just among the media, content creators, and special guests who just got done watching the showcase, but also between the Xbox staff observing them and taking the pulse of their reactions. There’s a sense of relief, almost. After several difficult years, Xbox has pulled off a successful and promising show.

Among those feeling optimistic is Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty, who shortly after the showcase sat on a panel with fellow executives and suggested that Xbox had at last “turned the corner.” After several years with relatively few major blockbuster successes compared to its direct competitors, Xbox was finally bringing out the big guns in games like Starfield and Forza Motorsport later this year, with more heavy hitters like Avowed planned into 2024.

It’s a turn that’s been long-anticipated after Xbox’s struggles in the previous console generation and the promises the company seemed to make back in 2017-2019 with its spree of major acquisitions. During those years, Xbox’s portfolio ballooned to a whopping 23 studios, leading many to expect that future years would bring a significant uptick in the number of first-party releases from the console maker. But thus far, Xbox’s release slate has remained slow and steady, disappointing fans and resulting in a narrative of console generational failure.

The First Turn of the Crank

Booty feels that Xbox’s time is here at last. He explains in an interview with IGN that the delay in part is a symptom of many of Xbox’s acquisitions at the time having unfinished projects and DLC obligations. They had to wrap up these projects before they could work on the kind of major Xbox games that fans were expecting. What we saw yesterday, he continues, is “the first turn of the crank” under Xbox’s banner for studios like Compulsion Games, inXile, and Obsidian, and assures that there is plenty more to come.

“I feel like we’ve got that rhythm and that cadence going across our studios,” Booty says. “Everything, as I look forward from here, today, going to the end of 2024, I have seen builds of the games. I’ve got some hands-on confidence that everything for the next 18 months, I know what shape it’s in, there’s not a lot of fliers there.”

Booty calls 2022 specifically an “interesting year in a lot of facets,” nodding to the fact that the company had to lean on much smaller-scale games, such as Pentiment, Grounded, and Minecraft Legends, to headline its portfolio. And while he doesn’t outright say it, his description of the future is tempered – we’re not about to be drowning in Xbox blockbusters all at once. Starfield and Forza will do some heavy lifting, true, but a number of Xbox Game Studios are still waiting in the wings with their respective projects missing entirely from the presentation. State of Decay 3, Perfect Dark, Elder Scrolls 6, Gears of War, Everwild, and more were conspicuously missing from the presentation, Avowed’s release window was a fairly generous “2024,” and Fable didn’t get a release window at all.

What’s going on with all those other studios, then? Booty reassures that nothing is amiss. He says that he’s done “recent visits” to the studios behind all the games I mentioned, played recent builds, and knows where they’re at. And he hints that Xbox may be saving some of its showings for “other events during the year, other beats that we want to hit,” then goes on to say Xbox wants to “manage expectations” on how it shows what’s coming up, offering Clockwork Revolution as an example.

We’re trying to be a little more disciplined about how we manage expectations.

“We had played Clockwork Revolution a year ago, and we decided to wait and show it here at this showcase,” Booty says. “So we’re trying to be a little more disciplined about what’s the timing around releases and how do we manage expectations.”

The Case of the Missing First-Party Games

Even so, some of those missing games have been in development for years now since their announcements, so it’s natural audiences are a little concerned about games like Everwild, Perfect Dark, and Elder Scrolls 6. And it’s not just an Xbox problem – games across the industry seem to be taking longer and longer to make.

Booty agrees: “I think there is a little bit of a reset going on in terms of what are the expectations for a big AAA game and how long or how many people it can take to make,” he says. He thinks it’s amazing that this industry has games like Vampire Survivors or other ID@Xbox titles made by very small teams in only a few years’ time. But on the other end, AAA games with hundreds of people working on them can take four, five, six, seven years or sometimes even longer.

Why, then?

“One, gen 9 hardware is awesome – ray tracing, all the stuff we can do,” he says. “But that trickles down through everything through how the assets are build. Like in Forza Motorsport, how the cars have to be built, how the lighting’s got to be done, how the track’s got to be set up, all the detail. The expectation is very high. Games are just getting more complex in terms of the interactions that are expected.”

Another factor, he says, is onboarding, and the difficulties associated with developing games to be comfortable both for new and returning players as franchises continue on and grow older and deeper. Booty offers FIFA or Madden as an example of this. Each new entry is easy to understand if you’re already very familiar with previous versions, but if you’ve never played before, they can be incredibly difficult to get into.

“And then also making sure as we take games outside of America and Western Europe, what do we need to do in terms of spending time on localization, or accessibility, those things. Which are all great, we’re very committed to them, but it gets to a complexity point.”

While these problems may be industry-wide, Xbox’s situation is unique in that it set an expectation for a coming burst of content years ago when it acquired its pile of studios all at once, leaving fans wondering when the floodgates would finally open. And Booty seems to agree that Xbox’s big promises seem to have gotten them in a little bit of trouble – even if he feels optimistic about its ability to deliver in the coming years.

“If I were to do a self-critique, I’d say maybe sometimes we do try to get the reality of our situation out a little earlier than others might,” he says. “But we try to build trust with our playerbase and trust with our fans, and letting them know how these things are going is important.”

We also spoke to Matt Booty about Redfall, and whether or not Xbox has a “hands-off” approach to working with its first-party studios. Booty also appeared on a panel with other Xbox heads to talk about Xbox’s first-party strategy, alongside Xbox head Phil Spencer speaking on the importance of console. And you can catch up on everything from the Xbox Showcase and IGN’s Summer of Gaming right here.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.