Xbox Game Studios: enjoy total creative and strategic freedom

[Amnesia]

For a decade, the American giant has suffered from the image of a destroyer of development studios. This one comes from a heavy heritage to bear. The closure of Lionhead Studios in April 2016 is the latest avatar on a long list and the ultimate symbol of an era when Xbox executives managed the nightmarish feat of turning gold into lead.

Even if the closing of Peter Molyneux's studio happened during the reign of Phil Spencer, the latter has been trying, since his induction into the head of the Xbox division in March 2014, to infuse a new strategy whose first juicy fruits and flavors have shown great promise in recent years. One of the pillars of this Spencerian strategy is a new relationship between the management team and its internal studios, based on the latter's confidence and autonomy.

Mojang served as a "friendly" experimental laboratory

On September 15, 2014, Microsoft announced the acquisition of the studio Mojang, creator of Minecraft , for an amount of 2.5 billion US dollars. This colossal investment immediately puts pressure on the shoulders of Phil Spencer and his team. In the video game industry, some are already betting on the date of death of the new acquisition and speculating on the voxelized form of the tombstone. The integration of the Swedish studio must be carried out perfectly, whatever the cost.

Matt Booty, the "facilitator", responsible for Xbox Game Studios​

“Mojang was a key point for us, because it was obviously an important acquisition, with an incredible frankness. But Minecraft is a complex product. It has been released on many platforms and is very community oriented. Our ability to integrate Mojang and to grow Minecraft gave us confidence. "- Phil Spencer

A man facilitated this integration and worked behind the scenes: Matt Booty. The new will and humility of the Xbox management team lead to no longer imposing the dictates of decisions made "from above", disconnected from the reality on the ground.

"With Minecraft, it was not our role to run a game that we did not create ourselves. It was a game that had a vibrant and prosperous community. The studio had created its identity and developed its own culture .
And we had a lot to learn from Mojang. It would have been easy to come and tell them, "Hey, we're going to show you how we do it. We are going to take you out of this Java code. We are going to make things evolve in C. We will get you out of Amazon Web Services and bring you back to Azure. ” But it's important to realize that the conditions that created Minecraft, what it has become now, are likely to be things that are difficult to recreate in a structure organized according to our criteria. "- Matt Booty

Helen Chiang, Mojang Manager confirms the new approach wanted by Matt Booty and Microsoft and goes even further. The example of Mojang allowed Xbox to obtain the bases of a method of acquisition and integration of additional studios.

 

[An IMDB tomato]

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