The Xbox Series X/S Official Thread

[Marci-Senpai]

Let’s go team Xbox!

 

[iceberg_is_on_fire]

Teams I predict will probably be joining the family in the future


Rocksteady
WB Montreal
TT Games
Avalanche
Monolith
NetherRealm
Asobo Studio
Bloober Team
Double Helix Games
JP Games


From Halo Gears Forza to a vast assortment of fire

Blooper wants to be acquired and Asobo needs to be bought due to the work they are doing with Flight Simulator. Who knows, Microsoft needs to wave that pen to sign more of these contracts.

 

[Bawon Samedi]

Blooper wants to be acquired and Asobo needs to be bought due to the work they are doing with Flight Simulator. Who knows, Microsoft needs to wave that pen to sign more of these contracts.

I don't care what anyone says Bloober would be a good pick. Poland studios are teeming with talent and with Bloober MS can poach from studios like CD Project Red.

 

[iceberg_is_on_fire]

How Project xCloud is helping game developers stay connected

What I love most about gaming is its ability to bring people to together. Whether playing with your family on the couch or with a group of friends scattered throughout the world, gaming helps fulfill one of our most basic needs: connection with one another. With many of us self-isolating and working from home, this connection is even more important.

Like many people, the Xbox and Project xCloud team has been adapting to the new environment we find ourselves in. We are having to change how we communicate, collaborate and connect with one another to maintain the inclusive environment we have worked hard to build.

The same is true with our developer community and we know firsthand the challenges that working from home presents. Specifically, many developers are unable to access their Xbox development kits. By not having access to their usual tools, game developers, artists, and designers may not be able to maintain the rapid iteration cycles needed to turn out new content for gamers. Many of the traditional Xbox remote access tools are designed to be used within an office environment; bringing developer kits home is often not an option and activities like playtesting and gameplay tuning require high frame rates and minimal latency.

We've set out to solve these remote access challenges by re-allocating our Project xCloud resources; going beyond mobile and creating a PC app experience for developers that runs a low-latency 60fps gaming experience that allows for continued game development. By giving developers access to our PC Content Test App (PC CTA) they can remotely connect to their Xbox Development Kits from their PC, allowing them to test, play and iterate as if they were in the office. It also prevents them from having to download daily builds to local hardware in the home, which can often take hours.

To date, developers across many of the biggest gaming studios have used the PC CTA to significantly improve their remote-working environment. We have received great feedback on the overall quality from those within Xbox Game Studios as well as from several of our third-party partners, including:

• Eidos-Montréal
• Infinity Ward
• Ninja Theory
• Playground Games
• Rare
• Turn 10 Studios
• Undead Labs

Many of our partners were early adopters of this solution and shared this with the team:

"xCloud will give the opportunity to dev teams and also internal and external QA teams to put their hands on our latest game builds from everywhere minutes after their release. By allowing the teams to connect remotely to their devkits and take advantage of the high bandwidth LAN network from our various office locations, xCloud will also add another layer of security as the content created will stay on our corporate network." - Guillaume Le-Malet, Infrastructure Director – Eidos-Montréal

"Our transition to work from home introduced some significant hurdles into our QA and development process. We went overnight from being able to test 2-3 builds daily to being limited to one build for the whole team, downloaded overnight. This was especially painful if that build failed in any way and could wipe out whole days. Using the PC Content Test app enables us to bring back our old workflows wholesale. Installs to kits on-site are now minutes rather than the hours it takes to download remotely, and we have the flexibility to react when something goes wrong." - Sean Davies, Technical Director – Rare

Microsoft's key principle is enabling people to achieve more, and our goal in Xbox has always been to bring gaming to more people. Whether it's by offering up the latest games on a diverse set of platforms or enabling developers to work more effectively at home, we are always looking at ways to help our partners achieve more. We recently announced a new initiative from Azure to create a fast and secure build transfer solution for game developer working remotely, and now we're offering even more ways to work remotely by using Project xCloud technology.

For Xbox developers interested in utilizing the PC CTA, start by contacting your Microsoft Program Representative who can grant you access. Once you have installed the application you can use the Direct Connect functionality to remotely access your Xbox Development Kit. From here you can use all the developer tools needed to develop your game such as performance simulations, network testing, system resource monitoring and general trouble shooting

 

[MarcP]

Blooper wants to be acquired and Asobo needs to be bought due to the work they are doing with Flight Simulator. Who knows, Microsoft needs to wave that pen to sign more of these contracts.

Techland was speculated as being bought out but I doubt that happens if they're going for WB Games. Damn shame Amazon bought Double Helix before MS got a chance to put in a bid. They aint put out a game in 6 damn years

 

[iceberg_is_on_fire]

This seems like a prelude to Microsoft getting some more studios if this is their pitch.

How Minecraft and Mojang taught Xbox how to buy studios

Mojang:

Mojang studio head Helen Chiang continues: "The approach we took to the acquisition came from Matt. A lot of times you see big companies buy smaller companies, and it's easy to lose the magic of what you've purchased. It was really important that this acquisition was about retaining all of that great talent within the studio, and ensuring that you're continuing to foster that creative spirit. It's not all about business results; it is about building a foundation of trust. As you can imagine, there was quite a gap in the culture between an indie studio and a large corporate company like Microsoft. It was about making sure they trusted that the leaders were not going to do harmful things to Minecraft."
(...) Before, Microsoft acquired companies in a specific way. And this not only set the foundation for additional game studios, but when you look at LinkedIn and GitHub, they also have this minimally integrated approach. That really was something that Mojang set the foundation for."

Double Fine:

"Things have been almost exactly the same, just without the terror of going out of business all the time," (...) Being able to apply it to games and creativity has been an adjustment, but a really great adjustment."

"With Psychonauts 2, we could see the end of our budget coming up, and so we had cut a lot of stuff," Schafer explains. "We had cut our boss fights. Now we are able to put those back in, and we're like 'we think people would have noticed if we didn't have those boss fights'. Being able to complete the game in the way that it was meant to be was very important.

"With Game Pass, it wouldn't make sense to acquire Double Fine and then assign us a bunch of Forza DLC. That's not what you'd want from a studio like Double Fine. And Game Pass seems like a great opportunity to have a diversity of games, a plethora of unusual content... I can see how the type of games that Double Fine makes could fit into that."

Obsidian:

"The only really different aspect of my day-to-day is not having to be the guy getting the money from the publishers. That has also changed how we approach development. A lot of times as an independent, how you develop games is dictated by the partner, because it's their money and they have a way they want you to make a game. It's been cool to apply those years of experience, and say 'hey, we can make the games the way we want to make them'."

"This idea of the limited integration studio was the best idea. Maybe it was intended or unintended, but by letting us be who we are, we then have a positive effect on Microsoft."

InXile:

"I prepared the whole thing, I sat with Matt and said here is what we want to do, and he said 'if that's what you want to do, then great'. It was over in like 60 seconds. That was wild for me, because we're used to this six month process of back-and-forth with a million questions -- with things like 'how many pieces of art will there be?'

Phil Spencer on future studio purchases

A lot of the business is doing really well, so we're always in the market for new opportunities with studios.

"The first priority was making sure the studios had the things that they needed to build the best versions of their games. That means extending some of the timelines, and giving them more budgets. We have really strong support from Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, and Amy Hood, the CFO. And there's been no signal at all that we should be slowing down, but just to go at a pace that is maintainable for us as a leadership team. We're always out there talking to people. But it has to be the right opportunity."

 

[Bawon Samedi]

This seems like a prelude to Microsoft getting some more studios if this is their pitch.

How Minecraft and Mojang taught Xbox how to buy studios

Mojang:



Double Fine:



Obsidian:



InXile:



Phil Spencer on future studio purchases

Yea, look at how MS purchased studios before Mojang. I agree.

 

[Rekkapryde]

^^^

curious to see if that’s going to apply to 2k who is currently forcing you to buy the special edition to get the “free” upgrade

they'll fall back.

Who wants to risk "losing" 2K and GTA. And that special edition is Take 2's way to weasel around Xbox policy.

 

[MarcP]

Phil:

" One of the things that really strikes me is the creative diversity in the portfolio. I am a fan of Xbox, obviously, but I don't mind going to 'are we the shooter box?' is it 'Gears, Halo, Forza, Gears, Halo, Forza'? I know all the memes about us. And I look at what the teams have built already this year, the things that we're going to show, and the things that are coming out later this year, and it is high quality, very different, and takes some creative risks"

Developing for Xbox Game Pass: "I could never pitch these ideas to a publisher"

Phil heard ya'll was talkin shyt. My nikka runnin all fades on the 23rd

 

[The Mad Titan]

How Minecraft and Mojang taught Xbox how to buy studios

 

[iceberg_is_on_fire]

Phil:

Developing for Xbox Game Pass: "I could never pitch these ideas to a publisher"

Phil heard ya'll was talkin shyt. My nikka runnin all fades on the 23rd

In Phil we trust, the revolution will be televised.

 

[Tenchi Ryu]

The 23rd gonna be hype

 

[Diondon]

In Phil we trust, the revolution will be televised.

Dropping mics

 

[datnigDASTARDLY]

The 23rd gonna be hype

the day after my bday, hype on a mill

 

[MarcP]

Setting the tone early