Microsoft’s Xbox games lead Matt Booty says its studios are in a “culture of cultures” and work together more than you think — Blizzard is even helping with Fable

Over the years, Microsoft has substantially grown the size of its Xbox Game Studios publishing wing, with the firm now overseeing over 30 game development teams as they update existing titles and work on upcoming projects.

Given how many studios there are and how different their specializations are, too, many assume that they operate under Xbox within their own cordoned-off bubbles and don’t interact much. According to Xbox’s recently promoted chief content officer Matt Booty, however, that’s actually not the case at all.

“It is the case that we have got a lot of different kinds of studios, and they’ve all got their own cultures, so we think of it as a culture of cultures,” he said during the latest edition of the Official Xbox Podcast. “I see a big part of my job is to provide just enough connection and just enough structure across those that they can communicate with each other, that they can share things back and forth, but never to the point that we’re coming in over the top trying to change who they are.”

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Booty went on to explain that all across Xbox Game Studios, several teams are collaborating with other developers in order to share helpful technologies or work together on projects where their shared expertise would be beneficial. For example, he revealed that the cinematics team at World of Warcraft and Diablo developer Blizzard is actually contributing to Playground Games‘ upcoming highly anticipated fantasy RPG Fable.

“We’ve really seen a lot, once we build those connections, of teams starting to share things with each other. … There’s a lot of examples of that. One, maybe just to sort of show a more complicated round trip, you had State of Decay 2, which had some pretty sophisticated technology for doing saving shared worlds and how you sort of save this persistent state, and the team at Obsidian, which is a really small team that built Grounded, took that tech to use in Grounded, but then the people at Obsidian kind of added to it, and now it’s gone first circle back to Undead Labs to be in State of Decay 3,” he added. “That’s kind of a cool example of how once we build these pathways, there’s a lot going on in between the different teams.”

Matt Booty Talks Showcase, Games, Studios, and More | Official Xbox Podcast – YouTube

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Some other examples Booty mentioned include South of Midnight dev Compulsion Games making use of Activision’s Mo Cap studio, Sea of Thieves creator Rare helping with Double Fine’s imminent pottery brawler Kiln, narrative tools shared between RPG developers, and in-game shop tech coming from Minecraft to Microsoft Flight Simulator to Starfield.

Gears of War’s The Coalition is also doing work with the Unreal Engine that’s benefitting several Xbox studios, and Booty says those efforts are at the core of the “XGTG” — a team called the Xbox Games Technology Group that “has the center of excellence around Unreal Engine work.”

“That is the group that really has the center of excellence around Unreal Engine work and then takes that out and makes it available to the other studios,” he explained. “They’re not brought in to work on the games and they’re not a firefighting team. They are developing the technology but packaging it up in a way that it’s very easy to hand off to the other studios.”

All in all, it’s very cool to hear that Xbox’s various development teams are collaborating a lot with one another, and the news that the Blizzard Cinematics department is working on Fable is pretty exciting in particular, given how awesome WoW, Diablo, and Overwatch cinematics are. Here’s hoping the “culture of cultures” continues to make development smoother for all of Xbox Game Studios.

Would you like to see Xbox Game Studios developers collaborate on games on a deeper level, and perhaps co-develop projects? Let me know in the comments, and vote in our poll.

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