Xbox sees movies as a marketing tool rather than a way to create a new story. Phil Spencer says they need to be “very careful”.

The universes presented in video games are so vast that a single franchise could be turned into several movies. But despite several attempts in this area, the community is not interested in the marriage of film and video games. At least according to the films released so far. And while there still seems to be a strong desire to bring interactive adventure games into the cinematic space, Microsoft has assured us that it is unwilling to follow this trend.

After all, when it comes to numbers, there is a big difference between the two mediums. Phil Spencer explained this during a conversation with Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick at TheGrill 2021, as reported by Gamespot. In this sense, the Xbox boss believes that the numbers between video games and film are so different that the idea of an audiovisual production needs to be seriously considered: ‘I think the commercial value, the market value for top-end games today is very high. But we are always very, very careful when we design something in the linear space”.

Therefore, Spencer does not want to take the risk that a critically panned film could damage a video game’s profits if it ends up harming the franchise. So “we see them as more of an exposure or marketing opportunity”, which further reinforces Spencer’s notion that the interactivity of a video game is lost if its story is moved to a more passive medium for the consumer.

That said, Microsoft is not entirely ruling out any of its most famous IPs from hitting the red carpet, with projects such as the Minecraft movie, for which a release date has yet to be decided, and the Halo series, which is due in 2022. Moreover, Microsoft’s opinion is far behind that of other companies, such as Naughty Dog, which has teamed up with HBO to produce a series of which we already have the first official images, or Nintendo with Super Mario, which has an extraordinary voice cast.

Source: GameSpot