Microsoft Gaming CEO, FKA Xbox boss Phil Spencer, doesn't want every game to be a never-ending, perpetually money-making live service machine, despite leading a publisher that owns some of the biggest live service games in the world.
Phil Spencer said as much in a recent interview with Xbox Era, pointing to the company's recent Xbox Developer Direct as evidence since it spotlighted Ninja Gaiden 4, Doom: The Dark Ages, and South of Midnight, three exclusively single-player games coming out of the publisher later this year.
"They were all games that have a beginning, middle and end," he said. "It was because I didn’t want to see every game turn into some big live service based game because they [the developers] felt like that’s where the business model was. It’s not easy to do that." Respectfully, he also acknowledged that "not every story is told in that way" and "not every game or creative idea supports that business model."
Xbox Game Pass, the company's subscription service, is a big reason why it's been able to invest so much into single-player games, he says, because some people might not drop $60 on a new release - but they might subscribe and try Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, for instance, and then stay subscribed before Avowed comes out a few short months later.
"And I love the fact that we can go and look at what [Psychonauts maker] Double Fine's working on next, when I think about a team like Compulsion - these aren't the biggest teams and they don't want to be massive 1,000 person teams and we want them to be able to do great work, and so I want to create a platform that can support that," he says. On the flip side, it should be noted that Microsoft shut down similar studios like Hi-Fi Rush makers Tango Gameworks, without giving a concrete reason, last year. Tango was eventually revived under PUBG''s publisher, though.
Diablo 4 and Call of Duty might be pumping out updates 'till there's no tomorrow, but Xbox's upcoming third-person folkloric romp South of Midnight will take roughly 10-12 hours to beat - which is music to my ears, because just look at how many new games are coming in 2025. Doom: The Dark Ages is also shedding the shooter's usual online offerings in favor of the "biggest" world in the series.
Catch up by checking out every Xbox Game Studio and every game in development at Microsoft. There’s a lot.
