Greenberg ‘Pleasantly Surprised’ by How Much Innovation & Content Is Coming from the New Studios

Microsoft acquired seven studios in a year and a few months. The acquisitions included Playground Games, Undead Labs, Compulsion Games, Ninja Theory, Obsidian, inXile, and more recently Double Fine.

All of these studios were working on some unannounced projects when they were purchased, as one might expect. In an interview with Xbox: The Official Magazine (November 2019, issue 182), Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg (General Manager of Games Marketing at Xbox) highlighted the strong creative energy that’s coming from those development studios, stating he had been pleasantly surprised by the amount of innovation and sheer content that’s being worked on.

For me, it’s just been incredibly exciting to go to each of these studios, and to open the door at Ninja Theory, or walk in at Obsidian, and walk around and meet the teams and see what is in the works. Across all the different teams, what I can say is that there’s all kinds of projects that people largely know about, and then there’s typically multiple other things they’re working on that nobody knows about yet. In every case, it’s really diverse, really exciting projects. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much innovation and how many things are being made. I think people are going to see, before too long, just how much content is coming. Those are just from the new studios that we’ve acquired. I think we have a lot to surprise fans with, and a lot to share over the next year.

You can expect more new games. You can expect sequels. You can expect new IP. You can expect things you’ve never thought of. That’s the fun part of it.

Ninja Theory, when we met with them, were like ‘Hey, we had this project in development before you guys acquired us, this multiplayer character shooter-brawler [Bleeding Edge]’. Wow, we didn’t expect that. Tameem Antoniades, who worked on Hellblade, his team is off working on something else and we haven’t talked about that yet. At Obsidian, there’s the team working on The Outer Worlds, a team that’s working on Pillars, and a team working on another secret thing.

And inXile: there’s the Wasteland 3 team, and there’s a team working on another thing. We don’t have just new IP – what we’ve done is taken a collection of some of the greatest creative minds in the industry and given them freedom and the resources to go do what they want to create. And then we really let them do that independently. We support them every way we can, and then we have them come back with those creations when they’re ready and work out the right time to show them.

It might not be long before Microsoft pulls the curtain on some of these projects. The X019 event (London, November 14th-16th) is said to be the biggest of the year after E3 and there should be a few games revealed there. Stay tuned on Wccftech to learn more.

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