Xbox Game Studios Boss Describes How The Days Of Single-Studio Triple-A Games Are "Long Gone"
Head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty recently explained how the days of triple-A games from single studios are “long gone.” According to the executive, partnerships involving multiple developers are the way of the future.
The news comes from a panel meeting held at the ongoing PAX West in Seattle, Washington by way of VGC. “How we make games is evolving,” Booty remarked. “The idea of a single team under one roof really doesn’t happen that often anymore.”
RELATED: We Need to Stop Being Toxic to Video Game Developers, With the Exception of Bobby Kotick
Booty went on to discuss a couple of past instances. “I’ll use an example, our Perfect Dark team down in Santa Monica, The Initiative.” The executive added that “we just did this big partnership with Crystal Dynamics and I read online ‘oh, this must mean there’s a problem or something.’ It’s quite the opposite. You’ve got this veteran team at Crystal Dynamics, a big triple-A team with over 100 people that becomes available, of course we want to work with them, particularly if they’ve made a game like that before.”
“And that’s how we’ve done an awful lot of work,” Booty pointed out. “If you think about Age of Empires 4 which just launched last fall, that was made in partnership with Relic Studios up in Vancouver, a great partnership. And even something like Flight Simulator, we worked with a studio in France called Asobo. And that kind of co-development when you’re working out with people like Certain Affinity, Iron Galaxy, Blackbird, all those studios are so key to the products that we make.”
The practice of spreading development over multiple studios however comes with a few caveats. “That, though, also adds some complexity where if one of those studios has problems, it
Read more on thegamer.com
