We’re slowly, but surely, winding up the time we have for the current generation of consoles. While there’s no doubt cross generational releases will be a thing for at least a year after the PS5 and Scarlett launch, the new consoles will be the focus for many people’s mindshare. That’s why it’s interesting that Microsoft is still pumping out games for the Xbox One at a pretty steady pace. They aren’t holding back for next gen like some may suspect they would, and they said it’s because there’s more than enough coming that they don’t need to.
In a GamesIndustry interview with Head of Xbox Game Studio Matt Booty said that they don’t plan to just drop support for the Xbox One just because a new piece of hardware is out. He likened it to phone iterations, saying you don’t abandon hardware in that space either, and that right now they have so much coming down the pipeline, there’s no need to ‘keep back’ anything for the Scarlett, and they are looking at the Xbox brand of systems as a whole ecosystem.
“We feel confident about our content pipeline so that we feel we don’t need to save everything up for that beat,” Booty said.
“But what I’ll also say is that today, when you launch a new device you are not eliminating all of the devices in that family to date. If I make a game for the iPhone, when the iPhone X comes out I can’t just write it for the iPhone X and pretend as if the 9, 8, 7 and 6 don’t exist.
“When Scarlett launches, there will still be the Xbox One S and Xbox One X out there. We really need to approach that family of devices in the same way that we approach PC, where the content scales to meet the device. That’s going to be the case for anybody. It’s not like, if we roll back the clock 15 years, when a new device was out and people wanted you to take your old device and just put it in the closet.
“We will absolutely lean in on the power of Scarlett. We think it’s going to be the best way to play and it’ll be the best thing to put in your living room. But we also want to understand that there will be a family of Xbox devices out there that we want to make sure we support fully.”
It’s an interesting thing to say, especially since Microsoft pretty much abandoned support for both the 360 and the original Xbox pretty quickly after launching their successors. Whether that support will really continue as much as Booty says remains to be seen, but at the very least, he doesn’t seem to be wrong about not holding back.