Console companies have an incentive to bring their multiplayer games to their competitor’s platforms. All of them.
Xbox’s president of gaming content and studios Matt Booty has explained why Microsoft did their big four game multiplatform experiment, and what they learned from it.
In a new interview with Variety, Matt went into detail on what the company saw come out of this ‘business experiment.
Matt starts out by describing how Xbox management saw the situation from their eyes:
“We really set up those four games, and if you look at the games that we picked, it might seem like a little bit of a grab bag, an odd assortment. But it really was set up and designed so that we can test a variety of content. And see specifically, what the reception would be for that content.
And, you know, also, in some cases we got teams, like the Minecraft team, or the Call of Duty team, that have been shipping multiplatform for literally decades. And then we got other teams where that’s a new muscle to build.
So we had some sort of business experiments that we wanted to run. And we also just mechanically, wanted to start to build that muscle and see how that was involved. So some of the smaller games, like Grounded, like Pentiment, like Hi-Fi Rush, I would say that it was great to see some of the positive review scores, and great to see some of the positive fan reception.”
So, while it’s true that seeing these Xbox exclusives go to Switch and PlayStation 5 looked like a radical change for the company, comparable to Sega bringing their first games to GameCube and PlayStation 2 after ending their hardware business, to Microsoft, it looked completely different. They saw the games they were already bringing to other platforms, and wondered if there was an opportunity to do it with more of their own games.
As Matt pointed out, the one game out of the four that they were really focused on was Rare’s Sea of Thieves. He said:
“But the one where we really focused with and went out and promoted was Sea of Thieves. We’ve been really pleased with what we’ve seen on Sea of Thieves. Just in terms of some things that I can share, that were encouraging to us, is that when we launched Sea of Thieves on PlayStation 5, we saw an uptick in engagement on Xbox and on PC.
So again, there’s this thing were you’ve got more people coming into the franchise, which causes more excitement, which actually grows the franchise overall. Which, if you really just want to be direct about it from a business point of view, allows us to reinvest in that franchise and continue to grow it.”
So as Matt pointed out, as counterintuitive as it seemed, bringing the game to PlayStation 5 actually led to more players on Xbox and Steam. And this was about more than simple word of mouth. This seems comparable to the situation with Helldivers 2, where the simultaneous launch on PlayStation 5 and Steam led to the game amassing more players than when it only launched on one of those platforms.
The word of mouth led to growing the player community, and as Microsoft also found, it led to bridges forming around that community. Matt said:
“So, that was sort of one of the first things that we wanted to see. Another really interesting encouraging stat is that about half of the people that we saw playing on PlayStation, were playing with people on other platforms.
So, this is about expanding that community. It’s one of the things that’s core to our Xbox promise about letting people play, where they want to play, with the people they want to play with, on the devices they play with.
And, it’s encouraging that we didn’t see a vertically insulated community there, that the work that the team had put in to being best in class in terms of cross platform play really paid off, because we saw people engaging outside of their own device ecosystem, which was great.”
It certainly makes one curious if Sony would ever want to try an experiment like that for themselves. They already are in a position to do that, since their contract with Bungie is to continue to make Bungie’s games multiplatform. Destiny 2, which recently launched its farewell DLC in The Final Shape, is cross-play across PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
We know this is the stuff that console warriors don’t want to hear. But the fact is the console game companies have an incentive to bring their online multiplayer games to each other’s platforms. We know for sure that the Splatoon community would explode if Nintendo thought to bring the franchise to PlayStation, Xbox, or even just PC.
It still seems unlikely that Nintendo would do that, but with Sony launching another multiplatform multiplayer shooter in the future, in the form of Bungie’s extraction shooter Marathon, they may expand those plans in the future, just like Microsoft did.
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