Xbox wants to be “more consistent” with bringing its first-party titles to PlayStation 5.
Speaking to GamesRadar, head of Xbox Game Studios Craig Duncan noted the irregularity of its release schedule, with upcoming titles like Fable and Kiln being set for a simultaneous release while Forza Horizon 6 will be available on PS5 at a later date.
“There’s always development realities about when these projects start – how big a team is, and what plans we have at the start of development,” Duncan said. “When a strategy changes, maybe you’ve got a plan that exists with a game and maybe you can adopt that, maybe you can’t.”
“Sometimes we are inconsistent. You see some games in one place, some games in multiple places. Just know that we’re going to work on that, and we’re going to try and be more consistent with what we do.”
Duncan went on to explain that Xbox ultimately “only has a certain amount of resources” to maintain a consistent multiplatform release schedule.
“Not everything is limitless,” he noted. “So we just want to do the best job, by each platform, by each game.”
“Sometimes we’ll maintain optionality. Some games we might go PC first, others we might go console first. Grounded 2 is a really good example of this, which we launched into Game Preview, Steam, and PC initially. So yeah, I think it won’t always be the same.”
As mentioned above, Fable is one of Xbox’s major first-party titles that will launch across all platforms later this year.
Duncan spoke about Playground Games taking on the franchise (originally created by Lionhead Studios), and whether it was a “risk” for the Forza Horizon developer as its first fantasy RPG.
“When I think about Playground and their history with the Forza Horizon franchise, and their desire to take on Fable as a franchise, I think it’s really about this relentless pursuit of excellence,” he said.
“We all know what that means in Forza Horizon, we’ve all seen that franchise get bigger and bigger every year, but what does that mean for Fable? I have played a bunch of the game, I’ve messed around with the combat and the Living Population, and it’s just mind blowing.”
Duncan continued: “There were some really special ideas in the original Fable trilogy, but what I think Playground has done is take some of these ideas and modernized them […] Fable is going to be an incredible RPG. It will be amazing to see what players do with it, and it’ll be massively shareable.”
The Xbox Game Studios head also addressed the closure of The Initiative and the cancellation of its Perfect Dark reboot last year, and decision to shut down Rare’s Everwild.
Both were the result of wider layoffs at Microsoft, which affected various studios and Xbox’s publishing operations.
“As an overall portfolio, we’re always looking at how everything is going. At whether everything is set up well. At whether we have got the right resources to go and deliver on our aspirations for all of our games,” Duncan explained.
“And we made some difficult choices; some of that is the job of managing a games portfolio and a number of studios. All I would also say as well, is that it doesn’t lessen anything from any of those people that did really great work on those games. Sometimes business decisions have to be made, which have wide reach and impact. We don’t like doing that. So the lesson is: how do we make sure we don’t have to do that? That’s really the goal there.”
