LESS T_T
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Game Pass sales interviews from Xbox top guys.
"How Game Pass is transforming Xbox": https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-11-14-how-game-pass-is-transforming-xbox
More announcements are coming. Probably TGA and GDC:
"Xbox Game Pass is an antidote to everything needing to be a live service game, Phil Spencer says": https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...g-to-be-a-live-service-game-phil-spencer-says
"How Game Pass is transforming Xbox": https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-11-14-how-game-pass-is-transforming-xbox
More announcements are coming. Probably TGA and GDC:
Halo, Ori, Age of Empires, Flight Simulator, Bleeding Edge, Battletoads, Everwild, Tell Me Why, Gears Tactics, Grounded... and there's more to be announced. Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, tells us that they'll be further reveals before Christmas and even more in early 2020.
"Game Pass itself takes care of being the service and the platform so when we go to design a game, we don't need to be thinking about what our plan is to sustain this for three or four years," Booty explains. "We don't need to think about how we come up with a set of content updates so that this thing can run as a service, or whether we're going to be doing Fortnite-style updates every three weeks. It frees us from having to think about that.
"It allows our game creators to do what they do best, which is make a game. Whether that's Outer Worlds, where it's a standalone single-player game that's about 25 hours long, or a game like Bleeding Edge, which probably structurally looks closer to a free-to-play game. It has really freed us up from having to think about designing around a service or around a business model and being able to just design the games that the team wants to make."
This means developers ought to consider the fact that they might have an influx of first-time users into a genre or franchise.
"It certainly is something we think about with our games right now," Booty says.
"We call it the FTUE -- the first time user experience -- which is how do you bring people in? I think you'll see that in some of the work we're doing in things like Age of Empires. Age of Empires has been around for 30 years. The people that play it know every mechanic in their sleep, but if suddenly there's a new audience for Age of Empires that's never played it before, how do you bring them on board? There are game franchises that have been around for a while where, as a player, I've just seen they keep adding features every year, controller complexity every year... it almost gets to the point where I could barely sit down to start to play this game because it is so much more complicated than what I remember. That first 30-minute experience, that onboarding and tutorial is definitely something we're spending more time on these days."
"Right now, quality and curation is so important to us," he says. "I don't want Game Pass to become the place where half-finished or lower-quality games end up. Given some of the challenges we've had with some things coming out of Xbox Game Studios that may not have been at the quality level that we'd want, I think for the time being we're going to stay very focused on improving our execution and the quality of games that we make."
"Xbox Game Pass is an antidote to everything needing to be a live service game, Phil Spencer says": https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...g-to-be-a-live-service-game-phil-spencer-says