“If you’re a PC customer and you want to play all our games on PC and never even learn to spell Xbox, that’s great”
10,11,12,13 GamesIndustry.Biz Top 100 Supplement - _v4.indd 3
Forza Horizon, ReCore and Dead Rising 4. All of those games are launching this year. They’ve been announced and there are dates next to them. On the indie side we’ve got games like Inside, we’ve got We Happy Few. There are a ton more, but I’m just thinking about some highlights in indie games that are coming this year. When I watch the other platforms, it’s not always clear to me when the games are shipping or how many of them are shipping this year. When I think about next year for us, I think about Sea of Thieves, I think about Halo Wars 2, we’ve got Crackdown coming, we’ve got State of Decay 2. We continue to deliver year-in and year-out. It’s an art form, so it’s not like every game is going to be perfect for every person, but it’s a diverse set of games, like you said. They’re not all shooters, they’re not all this, they’re not all that. This is a pretty diverse set of games from a great set of developers. And to say that the other consoles are doing a better job shipping more games for their customers - I don’t see that. I see what the other first-party is doing. Uncharted 4 was an amazing game; I think Naughty Dog did a really great job. I’m sure The Last Guardian is a great game, too. But I look at the quantity and the quality that our development
team’s been shipping and I feel really good about that. GI.biz: Xbox has evolved its strategy in the past: the about face with the always-on approach for Xbox One, separating Kinect from the bundle. Now the real focus seems to be Xbox Play Anywhere, the ability to play cross-platform and create one ecosystem between Windows 10 and Xbox. I think the strategy is really based on what we see our customers doing. Our biggest Xbox customers play on console and they play on PC, and I want to embrace what they’re doing. I see all the snarky comments that people send me - “Thanks for putting all your games on PC. Now I don’t have to buy an Xbox One” - and it’s this kind of weird [perspective], like somehow they’ve caught me in a trap that I didn’t realise we were creating. I want to build games and services that can reach people where they want to play. We have a great console experience when you’re sitting on your couch with your controller in your hand. That is a different experience than playing on your PC. I want to embrace the console gamer, PC gamer and, frankly, a lot of people who play on both. I think we’ve got a unique capability there. I’ve noticed certain people, certain constituents out
21/03/2017 13:13