The head of marketing for Xbox Aaron Greenberg has said that Microsoft is more in favour of letting developers do their own thing now rather than focusing on industry trends like games-as-a-service.
Speaking to Kotaku at the X019 event in London last week, Greenberg said that the Big M isn't alone in having been on a journey of discovery with the business model, as well as saying that there is interest from consumers in both service-based projects and more traditional games.
"Listen, I think the whole industry is on something of a learning curve there with games as a service," Greenberg said.
"For us, we empower our creative teams to go and make the games they want, and so, hey, I think it’s great Rare wanted to create Sea of Thieves and do something new with the 'games as a service' idea, and we fully respect and support them in continuing to do that. But it’s also OK for a game to just be a game – to have a beginning, a middle, and an end – and I think The Outer Worlds and Wasteland 3 are great examples of that. We’ll continue to support teams who want to do that.
"I would never underestimate the power of fans and fan feedback in this, and development teams listen to those folks, so I think we’ll see that pendulum swing back into more of a balanced place. It’s great for us to show a lot of new games at something like this, and among these new titles you can see not everything’s being built as a service. But that said, with some it does make sense, and we’ll continue to support those and support the fans playing those titles."
X019 also saw Microsoft expanding the number of projects available in its Project xCloud streaming service. Studios boss Matt Booty also said that the company is moving away from buying developers, having been on something of a spending spree since E3 2018. The exec also said that the Xbox Game Pass subscription service had removed a degree of risk for developers.
