Xbox Studios boss says the days of single-studio AAA games are ‘long gone’
The head of Xbox Game Studios says the days of single studios working on large-scale games are “long gone”.
During a Q&A at PAX West 2022 over the weekend, Booty was asked whether the large numbers of game delays over the past couple of years could be blamed mainly on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Booty replied that while the pandemic clearly played a key part in it, there are other aspects of modern game development that make delays more likely.
These included the difficulties in adapting to a new generation of hardware, the challenges in QA testing more complex games, and the fact that so many big games are now made with multiple studios.
“How we make games is evolving,” Booty explained. “The idea of a single team under one roof really doesn’t happen that often anymore. I’ll use an example – our Perfect Dark team down in Santa Monica, The Initiative.
“So, 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, right?
“You’ve got this veteran team at Crystal Dynamics, a big AAA 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. If you think about Age of Empires 4 which just launched last fall, that was made in partnership with Relic Studios up in Vancouver, 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 [Interactive], all those studios are so key to the products that we make.
“That, though, also adds some complexity where if one
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