Xbox Game Pass has been nabbing some pretty big third party multiplatform day one launches of late, from Outriders to MLB The Show 21, and that’s bound to continue in the months ahead. At E3, it was confirmed that Turtle Rock Studios’ Left 4 Dead-inspired co-op zombie shooter Back 4 Blood would also launch for the service on day one, and in a recent interview with GamesRadar, the game’s executive producer Matt O’Driscoll talked about how that’s going to benefit the game.
Being a multiplayer-centric game, it goes without saying that the thing that Back 4 Blood is going to need the most right from the get go is a wide pool of players, and as O’Driscoll puts it, thanks to the game’s Xbox Game Pass launch, it is assured of a massive pool of players pretty much the day it launches- which, according to him, is “mind blowing.”
“Yeah… day one, launching on Game Pass. That’s going to be kind of crazy, right?” O’Driscoll said. “We need a player pool, so that we’ve got matches going all the time. I think we’ve got that player pool from day one. I forget what the numbers are for Game Pass, but I think it’s 20 million-plus users, right? They will have access to our game from day one, which is kind of mind blowing. I’ve never launched a game that’s had that kind of accessibility from day one.”
O’Driscoll also added that the development team didn’t really have to make any changes to the game with its Xbox Game Pass launch in mind. According to him, signing the deal was a pretty straightforward process.
“We didn’t really,” he said. “So it was kind of super cool for us, that we didn’t have to pivot too much at all. There was no, ‘oh hey, we’re going on Game Pass but we’ve got to support this or we’ve got to do this’. It was like, the deal was struck, they [Microsoft] wanted the game on Game Pass – but they wanted the game we were making.”
Back 4 Blood is out on October 12 for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, and PC. An open beta of the game is live right now.
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