Microsoft’s tried to explain why they have taken too long to announce their upcoming games, but their argument isn’t 100 % airtight.
First, let’s talk about who said it and where. Matt Booty is Team Xbox’s Head of Game Studios, and he was addressing the issue of long waits for Xbox game announcements in an interview with Axios, as reported by Video Games Chronicle.
To quote Matt (edited and paraphrased for clarity):
“I think that the industry and the fans were a little behind the curve on sort of a reset to understand that games aren’t two or three years anymore. They’re four and five and six years.
There are higher expectations. The level of fidelity that we’re able to deliver just goes up. Games continue to get more ambitious as an art form.”
Matt’s case is that the new and original first party and second party games that Microsoft revealed in their recent Xbox Games Showcase, such as South of Midnight and Clockwork Revolution, weren’t quite ready to be revealed before this event.
And the reason for that is, that it takes longer to make games than gamers expect, and Microsoft has to contend with unreasonable expectations.
But the problem with this logic is, gamers are absolutely used to development periods of five years and longer now. Just to provide a sample of modern games that we have seen take this extended development period:
Batman Arkham Knight – four years after Batman Arkham City
God of War Ragnarok – four years after God Of War
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – six years after The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
And then there are the games that took unreasonably long periods to develop, for various reasons. We could look at the likes of Diablo III, Metroid Dread, and Final Fantasy 15 for this one.
So it isn’t really that gamers (or at least most of them) don’t have the proper perspective on game development. If marketing is done properly to set expectations, then gamers have a fair expectation of what they’ll get from a game in terms of graphics, performance, playtime, etc.
If you compare this year’s Xbox Games Showcase to last year’s, you can immediately tell that Microsoft relied a lot on third party games for that event in 2022. That included many games that we did see get released on Xbox, such as Dead Space Remake and Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty.
Regardless of what Microsoft says publicly, internally, you know that they had been debating on whether they could have revealed some of those games sooner than they actually did. The hype machine generated for Redfall might have been more prudently used on those games instead.
At the very least, they now claim they are set to release four new games a year for the next few years. Hopefully, this will be the first year for a revival for Xbox.
