Microsoft gambles big on Hollywood-esque 'Starfield' video game
"Starfield", one of the most-anticipated video games in years, launches worldwide on Wednesday with the hype -- and production standards -- of a Hollywood blockbuster.
And Microsoft has billions riding on its success.
The ever-evolving game is the tech giant's bid to lock players into its Xbox subscription service after some eye-poppingly enormous investments in the gaming sector, which is worth $200 billion globally.
A universe-spanning role-playing sci-fi game, "Starfield" is made by US studio Bethesda, which Microsoft bought as part of a $7.5 billion deal in 2020 to boost Xbox's appeal over Sony's PlayStation.
Microsoft is currently trying to get a $75-billion purchase of another studio, Activision Blizzard -- the makers of "Call of Duty" -- past regulators wary of rapid concentration in the sector.
The excitement for "Starfield" has been driven by a high rating of 87 out of 100 on review-aggregator Metacritic, based on early play-throughs by critics as well as strongly positive videos by gamers on YouTube.
Reviews praise its epic scale, multitude of interactive stories, engrossing first-person combat and the way it conjured ersatz interactive versions of movie franchises "Star Trek", "Star Wars" and "Blade Runner".
Its appeal underscores growing fascination with games that have become increasingly cinematic, complete with nuanced acting, storytelling involving moral dilemmas and big-budget, multi-year evolving storylines.
Those qualities mean they are essentially "interactive movies", said Simon Little, head of Video Games Europe, an umbrella organisation representing European games developers.
Other titles this year boasting those same Hollywood-esque qualities include "Hogwarts Legacy", which taps into the Harry Potter
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