In the case of Starfield, by the way, Bethesda Game Studios’ exploration has taken a bit of a hit, but we’ll get to that.

Microsoft has a strange approach to the fiscal year, because for them it starts on July 1, not April 1, and recently announced its first quarter results. Game revenue was up 9%, Xbox content and services were up 13% year-over-year thanks to Starfield and Game Pass subscriber growth. John Welfare said on Twitter, based on unofficial numbers, that the quarter was so strong that only five holiday quarters were stronger.

And Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was upbeat: “We were pleased to complete our acquisition of Activision Blizzard King earlier this month. Together, we will advance our goal of bringing great games to gamers everywhere on every device. With Game Pass, we are already redefining how games are distributed, played, and discovered. We set a record for hours played by subscribers this quarter. We released Starfield this quarter to great acclaim, with more than 11 million people playing the game to date. Nearly half of the hours played were on PC, and on launch day we set a record for the most Game Pass subscriptions added in a single day. In addition, Minecraft has now surpassed 300 million units sold. With Activision Blizzard King, we are now adding significant depth to our content portfolio. We will have 13 billion-dollar-plus franchises, from Candy Crush to Diablo to Halo to Warcraft to Elder Scrolls to Gears of War. We’re looking forward to one of our strongest first-party holiday lineups ever, including new titles like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III and Forza Motorsport.

But the sales of the Xbox series are not so muscular! Microsoft is still weak in this area (and we don’t have specific numbers because it’s been a console generation since the company said something like this after the PlayStation 4 beat the Xbox One in sales), as the balance is still minus 7% despite the release of Starfield, and it’s no coincidence that Nadella said that more than half of Starfield players do so on PC. The CEO is no longer tying his bonuses to Game Pass growth…

Let’s move on to Starfield. Bruce Nesmith was a guest on MinnMax. He worked at Bethesda Game Studios until September 2021, was Lead Designer on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and now writes science fiction and fantasy novels. He also worked on Starfield and completed his tasks before leaving, so the astrophysics data, space combat system design, and starship design were all completed by then.

Interviewer Ben Hanson asked Nesmith why the restrictions on exploration at Starfield are the way they are. Nesmith gave a very open and detailed answer: “There was a lot of discussion about the scope of the game. At one point I said, ‘You know, I bet this game would be a lot better if we limited ourselves to about two dozen solar systems and focused on those. The point was made, quite rightly, that once you’ve done one solar system, you’re not really adding much to your work by doing a hundred. If you just do your own solar system, all the variety that you have to do just to have that, you’ve done 90% of the work for the rest of it. Todd pretty much pulled the number 100 for the number of star systems out of thin air, but the more we went along, the more it was like, “Okay, so all the core activity takes place in these two dozen in the populated systems region, and the rest of it is open space, but people love our big games, they love that open space to explore, so let’s go ahead and give it to them. Then it was, “Okay, how do we make exploration meaningful? Again, you have to succeed on a planet. Once you have that formula, you have the formula for all the planets.

But if you’re also trying to do “build your own spaceship”, which they didn’t have to do, they could have given you a bunch of pre-built spaceships to buy. Once you do all the quest work and all the huge variety of plants and animals, you have to make hard choices, and I think some of the exploration stuff just didn’t come through as well as it could have because they decided to make other choices. Don’t get me wrong, in every game studio on the face of the planet, they know the choices they’re making and they know the things that are not going to be in there. They know what the players are going to whine about, but you have to make a hard choice. I think players have really gravitated towards building their own ships, which makes me personally happy because I worked really hard on that. So it was probably a good decision to say, ‘Well, exploration might take a little hit so we can put that same effort into making ship building really cool,'” Nesmith said.

So Microsoft’s position is not entirely positive.

Source: WCCFTech, WCCFTech