Xbox Studios Head Says Creativity Should Be an Inevitability at First-Party, Hints at 2024 Release Schedule

Xbox Studios Head Matt Booty, now formally wearing the role of President of Game Content and Studios after the recent restructuring, was featured in Episode 32 of The Fourth Curtain’s podcast.

The executive revealed that Xbox organized an in-person meeting of all the studio heads last month, bringing people like Brian Fargo, Todd Howard, Tim Schafer, Feargus Urquhart, et cetera together in the same room. On that occasion, Booty stressed that Microsoft believes all their games matter, from the biggest to the smallest, and will strive to make creativity an inevitability rather than just a possibility at all the studios.

I think it was about three weeks ago that we got all of the heads from Xbox Studios as well as from Bethesda Studios together for an offsite for a few days and it was really the first time some of them had even met. I think we had everybody put on a Post-It note of how many years they’d been in the games industry and when we added it up, I think it was like a thousand years, which is just amazing. It was exciting to just see those leaders and those teams be able to connect with each other.

The two things that we focused on were how important it is that all the games matter because, on the one hand, you’ve got these huge franchises like Skyrim, like Halo, these things that have been around for 20 years and have had tens of millions of people playing them. On the other side, you’ve got Tim Schafer from Double Fine making games like Psychonauts and smaller games, and teams like Obsidian that made Pentiment. 

All those two extremes and everything in between matter. Our job is to create a studio system where those things can all coexist and to create a place where creative people feel safe and supported so that they can be their authentic selves, they can do their best work and that creativity isn’t just a possibility, that it becomes an inevitability. We really think of it, it’s maybe a little worn out as a metaphor, but it’s a greenhouse in some ways.

The Xbox executive also kind of teased the 2024 release schedule from Xbox Studios. He enunciated 2023’s Starfield and Forza Motorsport in release order before naming Ara: History Untold, Towerborne, and Hellblade 2.

We’ve got a goal of a new release, a big game four times a year, so every three months, we’ve got something new coming out. I think with Starfield and then going into Forza Motorsport and then as we head into next year, we showed the game Ara: History Untold and Towerborne at Gamescom, we’ve got Hellblade 2 that comes later, so it feels like we’re getting there.

That’s pretty much the order most Xbox fans are expecting Ara: History Untold and Towerborne to launch: Q1 and Q2, respectively. Hellblade 2 coming in Q3 is not entirely surprising, given that’s the same quarter Ninja Theory picked for the first installment (which launched in August). That would leave Avowed for the final quarter, which makes sense since it’s by far the biggest game on this list. It certainly can use more time to be refined.