Microsoft has spent the past 18 months very publicly adding to its roster of first-party studios with a spate of high-profile acquisitions, and now Xbox Game Studios chief Matt Booty has outlined how they’ll be put to use.
When asked about consumer demand for more first-party titles during a recent interview with GamesRadar, Booty said Xbox owners will (hopefully) be able to look forward to a new game every three to four months in 2020.
“We feel really good heading into 2020. We’ve got a goal of being able to deliver a [first-party] game, roughly, every three to four months,” he commented. “We have a little bit of work to do to get there. It’ll be lumpy, but we’re closer than we were. And so we feel really good going into 2020 — and the run-up to Project Scarlett — with our content line-up.”
It’s an ambitious target, but Microsoft obviously feels it has the resources to deliver the goods. The company now has 15 studios working under the Xbox Game Studios banner, including a number of recent additions like Double Fine, Obsidian, Ninja Theory, and Playground Games.
Although Booty was eager to talk up Xbox’s growing first-party offering, he also dismissed the notion that the company has shifted away from third-party content.
“I don’t think there’s been a shift — no one, at least in Redmond, would say: ‘Oh, we’ve shifted from third-party over to first-party.’ Sarah Bond, who leads our third-party team, is out there day in and day out working with our third-party partners,” he explained.
“If you were to sit in a meeting back at Redmond, I think you would hear an equal amount of talk about first-party, third-party, and ID@Xbox. We take that altogether as our content stream. I think it’s just that, lately, we felt a little more proud about talking about what we’ve got going on with first-party.”
You can hear more from Booty by checking out the full interview over at GamesRadar. It’s well worth a read.