Xbox Studios Head Says Creativity Should Be an Inevitability at First-Party, Hints at 2024 Release Schedule

wccftech.com:

Xbox Studios Head Matt Booty, now formally wearing the role of President of Game Content and Studios after the recent restructuring, was featured in Episode 32 of The Fourth Curtain's podcast.

The executive revealed that Xbox organized an in-person meeting of all the studio heads last month, bringing people like Brian Fargo, Todd Howard, Tim Schafer, Feargus Urquhart, et cetera together in the same room. On that occasion, Booty stressed that Microsoft believes all their games matter, from the biggest to the smallest, and will strive to make creativity an inevitability rather than just a possibility at all the studios.

I think it was about three weeks ago that we got all of the heads from Xbox Studios as well as from Bethesda Studios together for an offsite for a few days and it was really the first time some of them had even met. I think we had everybody put on a Post-It note of how many years they'd been in the games industry and when we added it up, I think it was like a thousand years, which is just amazing. It was exciting to just see those leaders and those teams be able to connect with each other.

The two things that we focused on were how important it is that all the games matter because, on the one hand, you've got these huge franchises like Skyrim, like Halo, these things that have been around for 20 years and have had tens of millions of people playing them. On the other side, you've got Tim Schafer from Double Fine making games like Psychonauts and smaller games, and teams like Obsidian that made Pentiment. 

All those two extremes and everything in between matter. Our job is to create a studio system where those things can all coexist and to create a place where creative people feel safe and supported so that