Phil Spencer attended the GDC 2024 developer conference, where he gave an interview to Polygon. In particular, the top executive spoke about what is happening now in the gaming industry.
Spencer cited growing budgets as one of the biggest problems. Games have become more expensive, take several years to produce, and teams can consist of hundreds or even thousands of people. Modern AAA titles cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but their value hasn’t increased that much, so companies have to sell millions of copies to recoup their costs.
As a result, many publishers do not invest in risky projects, but prefer to invest in more reliable and predictable games. “Am I willing to take on a new IP address or a new type of game if the revenue risk is so high? I think it limits creativity in an industry I don’t like. Creativity is the cornerstone of what we need to be in games.”Spencer said.
These problems caused mass layoffs – only Microsoft, after purchasing Activision Blizzard King, announced the dismissal of almost two thousand employees.
If you have a sector that is expected to shrink in the coming year in terms of number of players and money, and there are many publicly traded companies in that sector that need to show growth to their investors – why would anyone else own someone else’s stock? ? If they don’t grow, a thorough cost analysis begins.
As I sit here at GDC, I think about my friends who have been laid off and lost their jobs, and how fair that is. I don’t want the games industry to become a place where people can’t build a career with confidence.
As a solution, Spencer suggests moving away from exclusive games and releasing games on third-party platforms. Microsoft recently ported several titles to PS5 and Nintendo Switch to attract more players. The manager also wants the titles to be available even on mobile devices.
The idea that the Xbox is just one device that needs to be connected to the TV does not appear in research among Gen Z. Because that is not the case for them. Some of them will have an iPhone, some of them will have an Android, but all the games are the same. I can still open TikTok on both devices – at least for now. All their stuff is available wherever they want. So for us, the whole point of Xbox is: “On Xbox I can find the great games I want.”
We talked about the most important announcements of GDC 2024 here.
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Source: VG Times