Phil Spencer acknowledges ‘it’s been too long’ since Xbox’s last big first-party game
BUT THE EXEC CLAIMS 2023 WILL BE STRONGER FOR ITS FIRST-PARTY OUTPUT
Microsoft’s head of gaming has acknowledged it’s been a quiet year for first-party Xbox games, but claimed that 2023 will be far busier for the platform holder.
By the end of 2022 five games will have been published by Xbox Game Studios this year,
but only one of those – Obsidian’s Pentiment – will be an all-new game developed internally.
The others are indie-developed As Dusk Falls, a Forza 5 expansion, an Age of Empires
re-release and Obsidian’s Grounded (which has been in Game Preview for two years).
“One thing we’ve definitely heard loud and clear is it’s been too long since we’ve shipped what people would say is a big first-party game,” Phil Spencer said on the Same Brain videocast.
“We can have our excuses with Covid and other things, but in the end I know people invest in our platform and they want to have great games.”
Spencer went on to claim that the 2023 line-up would be far stronger for Xbox, and that the sort of pandemic-caused
production delays, which saw its original big holiday release Starfield pushed into 2023, were now in the rearview mirror.
“But I look at 2023 and there’s a great line-up of games coming that I’m excited about. Getting our first real Xbox first-party games out of Bethesda, having them ship with Redfall and Starfield, will be a lot of fun.”
Spencer went on to claim that Xbox was doing “a lot more work” on PC, and that it would launch a big update for its Xbox app in a few weeks.