The head of Xbox said that he isn’t forcing the Xbox Game Studios (XGS) teams to make their games available on both the Xbox Series X and the Xbox One.

„The thing you’ll see on the 23rd is we’re giving our studios real creative freedom to build the games that they envision. As you know we’ve added a lot of studios to the Xbox Game Studios organization over the last few years and providing them with the financial stability, the creative freedom to go build the games that they want to go build, and our game creators want to build great games that can reach a large audience of players.

So, I think what you hear Matt [Booty] talking about and what our creators will say is we have a vision for every game that we’re building and the vision starts with the player, not the device. If a creator comes to us and says ‘No, I want to focus on next-generation‘ with their games, we’re completely open to that and we’re very supportive of that. If a creator comes to us and says I have this vision for reaching these customers across different platforms and different generations we’re completely supportive of that.

It is really about our creators having choice and allowing them to build the games that they want to build to reach the audience that they’re looking for and not things that we’re mandating to our creators in terms of what they have to go do. It’s not our rules for our platform it’s more about creators creating the games that they want to go build looking ahead,” Spencer told GameStar. Yes, he kept calling the devs creators, but if he says there is no enforcing of cross-gen development, why did he say there will be no Xbox Series X-exclusive games for the next couple of years…?

Still, his comment might make sense: Microsoft did significantly expand the XGS portfolio in the past few years, and they might have been working on current-gen games – and now, Microsoft‘s backing can make them work on next-gen patches/updates without dropping the work they have done so far.

„As an industry, we can price things whatever we want to price them, and the customer will decide what the right price is for them. I’m not negative on people set a new price point for games because I know everybody’s going to drive their own decisions based on their own business needs. But gamers have more choice today than they ever have. In the end, I know the customer is in control of the price that they pay, and I trust that system,” Spencer told Washington Post, essentially saying that if people keep buying more expensive next-gen games (such as NBA 2K21), then this will become the standard.

He added his thoughts about Xbox Game Pass: „Because there’s such initial friction for a new customer to get into a game, which includes the retail price point, games have to do things and work hard to overcome that friction. Game Pass games are games that test the traditional tropes of games, and allows creators to get adventurous.”

Still, Sony has immediately moved on to develop next-gen titles, so being suspicious feels right here.

Source: WCCFTech, WCCFTech

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