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It might be hard convincing thousands of laid-off developers, industry leaders who had their studios suddenly shut down, and the dedicated staff behind abandoned projects that the video game industry is a flourishing rainforest. But Ed Fries, who led the original Xbox team and Microsoft's gaming division as vice president until 2004, is going to try.
Speaking to The Expansion Pass podcast channel host Luke Lohr in an April 8 interview, Fries dismisses the idea that gaming is falling apart due to generative AI and says, "It's just not true." He stresses the fact that "PC games was the largest growing part of the game business last year. So here we are, 25 years later [from the original Xbox release], and you know, it just shows the potential for games is still huge. The potential for growth is still huge."
Fries also seems sated by the evolving importance of global game markets, agreeing with developers based in China that the country is moving to the forefront of AAA gaming. He says, "when we launched Xbox, India and China looked very similar. Now, some of the biggest game publishers in the world are Chinese. So India is growing. Middle East, obviously, with owning Electronic Arts now."
I wonder if some of Fries' optimism also comes from his own career trajectory – he joined Microsoft to work on its office software like Excel in 1986, three years after the infamous video game crash, until eventually moving up and helping establish Microsoft Game Studios by 2000. As an executive, he's guided devs through enough critical change to know, as he tells Lohr, "There's like this pendulum that swings back and forth from excitement to conservatism over and over again in the game business, and to me, it's frustrating, because it's like, I've seen so many of those swings of the pendulum.
"It's like, 'Oh, you're laying off too many people, you're canceling too many projects. OK, now you're starting too many projects.' You know, it's like, 'Hey, why can't we just go down the middle?' But it just doesn't seem to work that way."
Nonetheless, Fries says the issue boils down to, "if you look at the game business over the last, you know, more than a decade – it's grown, on average, 5% year-over-year, very steady."
But, again, I'm aware of the fact that this is a former Microsoft executive who's summarizing the carnage of the modern game industry as just market ebbs and flows. Meanwhile, Wizardry developer Brenda Romero recently commented that she and husband John Romero, who co-founded id Software and designed Doom, "were there in the '80s for the crash, and this is definitely crashier."
If Fries senses that, he isn't letting it show. "To me, it was like the destiny of games to take over," Fries says.
