Overview
- Xbox Game Studios Head Matt Booty was a featured storytime speaker at PAX West last weekend. Brittney Brombacher in What’s Good Games.
- During the panel, Matt spoke about his time in the games industry, sharing ideas about how others can get started, and where games are headed.
- You can see the full archived version of the conversation here.
Since joining Microsoft in 2010 to lead the in-house game development team, Matt Booty has overseen some of Xbox’s biggest moments in gaming over the past decade. Mine Craft Last weekend, Matt was a featured storytime speaker at PAX West 2022, sharing details about his 30 years in the gaming industry, from pinball and arcade games to Xbox. In a 50-minute session, Matt shared his wisdom on how to enter the industry, offered some thoughts on where the game was headed, and weighed in on who would win the battle against Master Chief. . Mortal Kombat Scorpion.
Entire session archived herebut for your convenience, I’ll share a few select clips below:
About the changing culture of the industry: “I want the people who make games and the people who play them to be the same.”
Game Complexity and Expectations: “It used to be that you would ship a game, come out with a little disc, pop it off, and be done with it. Now there’s an expectation of more content…and an expectation that it will continue to grow. ”
Why are so many games lagging?: “Some of the processes we have have not kept up with how quickly we can create content. You have to test the whole thing front to back and side to side.”
Editor’s Note: After the keynote, I caught up with Matt who revealed his comments about using AI in QA testing. “Digital tools have always been central to the evolution of video games. Our goal is to give teams more time to be creative and iterate quickly. While it doesn’t replace the quality team, automation allows us to handle testing tasks at scale, while allowing us to focus our skills on complex design-related nuances.Our test and quality teams are a critical part of the development process. part, and much of the AI experimentation is done by the test team themselves, which saves us from having to spend time on repetitive tasks like probing texture seams in large open-world games, or Look for gaps in collision boundaries.”
H.Specialization in gaming roles has created more opportunities for people to participate in the industry: “There are many ways to get into the game, but in the days of Space Invaders, that wasn’t the case.”
Game making is evolving: “Our Perfect Dark team is The Initiative in Santa Monica and they just signed a big partnership with Crystal Dynamics and I read online that ‘this must mean there’s something wrong’, but not at all. It is the opposite. Crystal Dynamics has this veteran team and a large AAA team of over 100 people will be available. Of course, we would love to work with them. ”
Passing the torch on to the next generation of game creators: “Games have come to a point where they are responsible for using media correctly…we can tell life-changing stories.”
Thanks again to Brittney for leading an insightful conversation with Matt at PAX West last weekend.You can watch the full Here is the recorded stream.