Single-Studio Developed AAA Games "Long Gone" Says Xbox Studios Executive

Having been revealed in 2020 at Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards, it was then revealed that the upcoming *Perfect Dark* would be a co-developed project between Xbox’s The Initiative, and (then) Square-Enix’s Crystal Dynamics. Since then a lot has changed, Crystal Dynamics was acquired by the Embracer Group, while development on *Perfect Dark* continues to progress well supposedly, despite the game losing close to half of its key staff.

A lot has been said by fans and media about the developer partnership, regardless of the fact that development has seemingly been rocky. Many were concerned by what it meant for The Initiative, and what it meant for the project as a result. Now it seems that Xbox is seeing this partnership as the future, if Xbox Studios head Matt Booty’s latest comments are anything to go by anyway.

At a recent Q&A at PAX West, Booty was asked about the nature of the various game delays that the publisher has experienced, the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns, and more. He cited other important factors like current studio structure, as being equally as important.

“How we make games is evolving… The idea of a single team under one roof really doesn’t happen that often anymore. I’ll use an example – our Perfect Dark team down in Santa Monica, The Initiative,” Booty discussed. “So, we just did this big partnership with Crystal Dynamics, and I read online, ‘oh, this must mean there’s a problem or something’ – it’s quite the opposite, right?”

“You’ve got this veteran team at Crystal Dynamics, a big AAA team with over 100 people that becomes available. Of course we want to work with them, particularly if they’ve made a game like that before. And that’s how we’ve done an awful lot of work. If you think about Age of Empires 4 which just launched last fall, that was made in partnership with Relic Studios up in Vancouver, great partnership. And even something like Flight Simulator, we worked with a studio in France called Asobo. And that kind of co-development, when you’re working out with people like Certain Affinity, Iron Galaxy, Blackbird, all those studios are so key to the products that we make.”

“That, though, also adds some complexity where if one of those studios has problems it then impacts the schedule. So the days are gone when you can sort of go ‘everybody, round up the team in the cafeteria, I want to tell everybody to work harder this Wednesday.’ That’s long gone, it’s gotten a lot more complicated than that.”

The development scene is ever evolving, especially in this post-COVID-19 lockdown era, and while we’ve seen plenty of internal developers work together on single titles, such as at Ubisoft on Assassin’s Creed, or Activision on Call Of Duty, we rarely hear anything like this from the first-party studios, making Booty’s comments so fascinating. What this amounts to though, will remain to be seen.

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