Four acquisitions and one entirely new studio make five
Microsoft has a major Xbox exclusives problem. Today’s announcement of five new internal studios is meant to help ameliorate this weakness, giving the Xbox One exclusive access to even more titles. Four of these new studios are acquisitions, while the fifth is an entirely new organization.
“We are committed to building an industry leading first-party studios organization. And as you saw earlier, we are making one of our greatest single year investments in teams by adding five new creative studios,” Xbox chief Phil Spencer said at the end of the Xbox press conference. “We have committed our team, our company, our technical resources, so we can declare to you today, and next year, and all of the years after that, you will always experience the best of gaming on Xbox.”
Let’s go through these five studios, one by one:
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The Xbox One only has two exclusive titles for 2018, both already released: Sea of Thieves and State of Decay 2. The other, previously announced exclusive for 2018 was Crackdown 3, which has been delayed to early next year. It also has a checkered history of acquiring developers. While the 2014 acquisition of Minecraft -developer Mojang was a coup for the company, previous developer acquisitions — from FASA to Ensemble, Twisted Pixel to Lionhead — have not been as successful.
With Sony’s exclusives strategy turning out game of the year-quality titles with some frequency, this announcement of five new studios is welcome news for Microsoft’s exclusives problem.
Added quote from Spencer.
