Interview with Xbox marketing boss Aaron Greenberg -
In fact, Xbox marketing boss Aaron Greenberg tells us it has "more third-party partnerships this year than we have ever had."
"A lot of it is our partners, especially after we launched Xbox One X, are interested in making sure they are able to work with a platform that is going to be a showcase for their games," he says. "We start with the developers. They want to show their games where they look and play the best, and so having the performance advantage and being able to show their games in 4K, with great frame-rates, is great for those folks. And then on the business side there are mutual benefits; we can go to market together, we can do bundles, we can introduce people to their franchises and they can help us sell consoles."
"We weren't quite sure how this was going to go first holiday [with X]," says Greenberg. "But what we've found from the independent media, from Digital Foundry to all the people who do the technical evaluations, is that every single game is looking and playing best on X, whether it's faster load times, better frame-rates, actually running in native 4K.
"So specifically, if you talk about wanting to play Red Dead, or FIFA, or Call of Duty, or our games, whatever game you're a fan of, we can say that your game is going to look and play best on Xbox One X. For a lot of gamers that have invested in 4K TVs, and really want that premium experience, that matters a lot. And in many cases gamers will own multiple systems, but then it's a case of where do they want to go buy third-party titles? And we've definitely seen customers choosing our platform because of the power advantage."
"We're going to get it out early (October 2nd) and before the blast radius," Greenberg says. "Then we didn't need Crackdown or any of our titles in this holiday window. We're planning to launch that in February, and then after that we will launch Ori and the Will of the Wisps. We like to have a steady cadence of content throughout the year. But there is more than enough content this holiday. That's why we're working with so many third-party partners to showcase their games and help drive our platform during that window. I can't think of a holiday that had more AAA games in such a tight time period."
"There are fans of the Forza franchise that we know are going to buy every release," Greenberg notes. "The question is, are the more mainstream gamers who maybe buy three games a year, are we going to make that list of three games? And you're right, Forza Horizon 3 greatly exceeded our expectations when it launched and every single month since. It's been incredible.
"Horizon 3 was, in many ways, a great open-world game. The game and setting was very unique and, with the quality of the game, it stood out. The challenge for [developer] Playground was how do you build on that? Having the setting in beautiful Britain, which as we know is where Playground is based, being able to add in the elements of the four seasons and how that can change gameplay... that is going to take the franchise to a whole other level.
"So our expectation is that Forza Horizon 4 is going to be the biggest and best-selling Forza game that we've ever launched. Currently our pre-order tracking is well ahead of where we want, and tracking ahead of where we were with Forza Horizon 3. So the early indicators are really good. And that's before you get into the fact that this title will be in Game Pass, which will allow it to reach another set of gamers who may never have played or bought the game."
"Sea of Thieves is a big priority for us," says Greenberg. "Both Sea of Thieves and State of Decay 2 were, for us, breakout hits of the spring, They exceeded what we expected them to do. Sea of Thieves has over 5 million players, State of Decay 2 has more than 3 million players. They both sold more than we expected and drove a lot of great engagement with Game Pass.
"For Sea of Thieves, [developer] Rare has dedicated teams that are building add-on content that's completely free. The entire community gets them. They've added new ships, gameplay, quests and things that is going to be great for engaged fans who want to keep playing, but every couple of months the game gets bigger, so it also enables us to go back to people who have never played and introduce them to it. That's modern marketing. People don't need to get a new game to get new content and innovation."
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/ ... ime-period
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