Not only Sony wants to (mostly!) focus on story-driven games: even Microsoft admits that they see potential in this genre.

„Microsoft has been a creator-led company from the beginning. I mean, on DOS, anybody could build an app – you were a game publisher if you had a compiler and a floppy drive. You just built your game, copied it over to a floppy, put it in a Ziploc and you’re selling; you’re a game publisher. I like that access and I want to get back to that as an industry,” Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, told The Guardian in a new interview.

„I think we will see a lot of games start to include things that are based around scripting and the ability to add to the game. With Forza Horizon 5, we added the ability to design challenges and obstacle courses. We’ve had Halo Forge, which lets you design your multiplayer levels. In Flight Simulator, that activity is a lot more sophisticated.

So I think we’ll see that going forward, where people just have an expectation that they can do more through scripting and mods. And certainly, with the addition of Bethesda to the Xbox family, they’ve got a long history of understanding how mods work – we’ve seen that with [The Elder Scrolls V:] Skyrim,” Matt Booty, the head of Xbox Game Studios, added.

„I think we’re probably building more of those [story-driven games] now than we’ve been in the history of Xbox,” Spencer said, emphasising the need to support riskier projects, which in turn will be supported by the wider availability of demos and early access (via Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Cloud Gaming) in story-driven games.

„We don’t have any direction or mandate that says every game has to be an ongoing, sustained game. Take Psychonauts: there might be a Psychonauts 3, but I’m not going to tell [designer] Tim Schafer to go make it. Knowing the history of games that he makes, I don’t think he’s going to be making a game that has seasons and goes on for five years,” Booty said, pointing out that the devs are free to experiment.

Spencer also said that he expects studios to enter the gaming industry and see success from unusual regions in the world: „It would surprise me if that doesn’t happen. Just knowing the available talent, and the tools [such as game engines Unity and Unreal] that are so much more accessible … I would be surprised if, in the next three to five years, you don’t see numerous studios in places that aren’t the traditional hubs of video game development.” Places such as India, Africa, or South America.

For instance, Hungary isn’t a stronghold in game development, but this country has a solid studio at least (NeocoreGames).

Source: WCCFTech, VG247