In light of Sony’s purchase of Insomniac Games, many wonder if Microsoft will respond in kind with even more studio purchases. After all, it’s thought that the acquisition was a response to the latter’s own studio collecting spree. However, that won’t be the case, Microsoft is seemingly done buying studios for now. Well, probably.
Aaron Greenberg, General Manager of Xbox Games’ marketing group, discussed the Microsoft’s roll of increasing its stable of developers on an interview with Twinfinite. He confirmed that while there was a time where the company was focused on adding more first-party content by acquiring more studios. But he wasn’t sure if Microsoft would be buying any other studios in the near future.
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“It’s a tough question to answer,” he admitted. “What I would say is, we were very deliberate. I think Phil spoke to this as well: there was a period of time in which we were very focused on adding more content to our first-party studios.”
The many studios Microsoft have purchased have given them a bigger variety of titles. Greenberg expressed his content with the, well, content in the pipeline from these newly acquired studios.
“I think we feel good about the level of content we have coming from our internal studios, but we felt good about that and then the opportunity with Double Fine came and that was a perfect fit,” explained Greenberg, referencing Microsoft’s acquisition of Tim Schafer’s studio earlier this year.
He then hinted at all the secret projects he knows about and how we will here sometime in the future.
“It’s been exciting and it’s been great getting to know all these teams, going out and sitting down with Ninja Theory, or the team at Obsidian or inXile, and seeing the stuff that they’re working on now that people know about and the secret things they have in the works that people don’t know about yet,” stated Greenberg. “We’ll in time be sharing more about those.”
It pays to note that, while Sony may have stolen Microsoft’s thunder with the announcement of Insomniac purchase at Gamescom 2019, the latter still has a number of studios, both old studios and newly acquired ones, that it can rely on. The company feels that the content its getting already covers enough genres and game types, and will help support both its current, and next generation platforms.