Xbox has a number of studios under its umbrella, with those perhaps best known for bombastic shooters like Activision to more quirky teams such as Double Fine, which often presents us with surreal and often psychedelic story driven trips (looking at you, Keeper).
But, while each team has its own forte, these developers all help each other out where they can, so says Xbox’s recently promoted chief content officer, Matt Booty. This includes the likes of Diablo and Overwatch‘s Blizzard helping with the upcoming Fable reboot.
“We have got a lot of different kinds of studios, and they’ve all got their own cultures, so we think of it as a culture of cultures,” Booty explained during the most recent edition of the Official Xbox Podcast. He added “a big part” of his job is to “provide just enough connection, and just enough structure across those, that they can communicate with each other, that they can share things back and forth”.
Booty assured these ‘connections’ are “never to the point that we’re coming in over the top trying to change who they are”, however once they were built, “teams [started] to share things with each other”.
Some examples the exec gave include The Coalition helping inXile Entertainment with Unreal Engine 5 for Clockwork Revolution, Blizzard providing cinematics support on Playground Games’ Fable, and South of Midnight studio Compulsion Games using the Activision MoCap studio. Booty also said Rare – known for the likes of Sea of Thieves – is lending some of its multiplayer experience to Double Fine for party-brawling pottery game Kiln (which is set to release next week).
“Maybe just to sort of show a more complicated round trip, you had State of Decay 2, which had some pretty sophisticated technology for doing saving shared worlds and how you sort of save this persistent state, and the team at Obsidian, which is a really small team that built Grounded, took that tech to use in Grounded, but then the people at Obsidian kind of added to it, and now it’s gone first circle back to Undead Labs to be in State of Decay 3,” Booty furthered. “So, that’s kind of a cool example of how once we build these pathways, there’s a lot going on in between the different teams.”
He also noted that in-game shop tech which was used in Minecraft went on to appear in Microsoft Flight Simulator and Starfield. Teams also share narrative tools and tips, Booty said.
You can check out the full conversation with Booty, where he talks more about his new role at Xbox as well as a liiiittle bit about Project Helix – the next generation of Xbox console – below.
Booty was promoted to Xbox’s chief content officer following the departure of Phil Spencer, who announced he would be retiring from Microsoft after nearly 40 years with the company in February. At this same time, Asha Sharma was announced to be taking over as Xbox’s CEO.
For more, be sure to check out our Chris’ feature on everything happening with the new roles at Microsoft: The future of Xbox is vague and contradictory, with just a glimmer of hope.
