Xbox president Sarah Bond also talked about the growth potential she sees in cloud gaming and had an “answer” for the closed studios…
Bond was a guest on Bloomberg Tech and talked about the launch of the long-awaited Xbox mobile store on the web sometime in July (The Verge editor Tom Warren mentioned its existence back in October) to get around the limitations of the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. The first games will be Microsoft IPs (such as Minecraft and Candy Crush, acquired via Activision Blizzard King), with the gates opening to partners later:
“We talk a lot about there being 3 billion gamers. Two of them play on mobile, and half of them actually play on mobile and they play on another device. But there isn’t really a gaming platform in-store experience that is player-centric and truly cross-device, where who you are, your library, your identity, and your rewards travel with you instead of being locked into a single ecosystem. We’ve seen that opportunity for a long time, but we wanted to make sure that everything we built was really grounded in the people who play these native mobile games and the creators of those games. It was important for us to partner with a team that has really deep expertise in mobile, and now we have that.
In July, we will be launching our mobile store experience. We’re going to start with our own first-party portfolio. You’re going to see games like Candy Crush and Minecraft, and then we’re going to extend that capability to partners so they can take advantage of it and have a true cross-platform, gaming-oriented mobile experience. We’re going to start with the web, and we’re doing that because it really allows us to have an experience that’s accessible across all devices, all countries, no matter what, regardless of the policies of closed ecosystem stores, and then we’ll expand from there.
We have been investing in cloud gaming for some time because we really believe that opening up these beautiful, immersive experiences to more gamers is important for the growth of the industry, for developers. We know that people want to play these experiences, and we’re seeing tremendous growth there. We have more demand than supply in this space. You’ll see us adding more capacity, introducing more options for people to jump in and play on the cloud. It’s growing faster than the overall market, it’s really bringing in new players and growth for us, so it’s an area that we’re investing more in and we’re excited about,” Bond said.
Then she talked about nothing for a minute. No kidding: when it came to the issue of several studio closures (including Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks), Bond’s response was anything but an answer: “You know, one of the things I really love about the game industry is that it’s a creative art form, and that means that the situation and the success of each game and each studio is really unique. There’s no one size fits all for us [Xbox Game Studios i.e. Microsoft]. And so we look at each studio, each game team, and we look at a whole host of factors when we’re faced with decisions and trade-offs like that. But it all comes back to our long-term commitment to the games that we’re making, the devices that we’re making, the interfaces that we’re making, and making sure that we’re setting ourselves up to deliver on those promises.”
Xbox president Sarah Bond responds to a question from Bloomberg's @dinabass about why Hi-Fi Rush developer Tango Gameworks was shut down. Full interview here: https://t.co/te5Trhut0Q pic.twitter.com/LGs0n9iV0t
— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) May 10, 2024
She would have been better off not talking about it. By the way, back in December, Xbox CEO Phil Spencer had already stressed that the mobile Xbox Store was a key part of their strategy…
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