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- Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty attended PAX West this past weekend, hosted by Brittney Brombacher from What’s Good Games.
- During the panel, Matt spoke about his time in the games industry, how others can get started and shared ideas about where games are going.
- You can view the full archived version of the conversation here.
Since joining Microsoft in 2010 to lead internal game development teams, Matt Booty has overseen some of the biggest gaming moments for Xbox over the past decade – including a key role in the acquisition of Minecraft in 2014. Last weekend, Matt was the Storytime Featured Speaker at PAX West 2022, where he shared details about his 30 years in the g aming industry, from pinball and arcade games to Xbox. During the 50-minute session, Matt shared wisdom on how to break into the industry, offered some thoughts on where the games are going and weighed up who would win in a Master Chief vs Mortal Kombat
The entire session is archived herebut for your convenience, share a few selected clips below:
On the subject of culture change in the industry: “We want the people making the games to be the same as the people playing them.”
About the increasing complexity of games and the associated expectations: “You used to send a game, a little disc came out and off you went, that was the end. Now there’s an expectation that there will be more content… and there’s an expectation that it will continue to grow. But someone has to build the stuff.”
Why are so many games being postponed?: “Some of the processes we have haven’t kept up with the speed at which we can create content. One of those is testing… Every time something new is added to a big game, the whole game has to be tested front to back and side to side.”
Editor’s Note: After the keynote, I caught up with Matt who shared his comments on using AI in QA testing: “Digital tools have always been at the core of video game development. Our goal is to give our teams more time to be creative and iterate quickly. AI testing isn’t about replacing testing and quality teams, it’s about enabling them to focus their skills on the complex, design-related nuances while automation handles testing tasks at scale. Our testing and quality teams are a valuable part of the development process, and much of the AI experimentation is performed by our testing teams themselves, freeing others from spending time on repetitive tasks such as: B. searching large open-world games for texture seams or looking for gaps in collision boundaries.”
HOur specialization in gaming reels has opened up more opportunities for people to enter the industry: “There are so many ways to get into games, which wasn’t the case in the Space Invader days.”
How we make games evolves: “Our Perfect Dark team down in Santa Monica, The Initiative, we just got this big partnership with Crystal Dynamics and I read online ‘that must mean there’s a problem’ – quite the opposite. They have this experienced team at Crystal Dynamics, a big AAA team of 100+ people that’s becoming available – obviously we want to work with them.”
Passing the torch to the next generation of game developers
Thanks again to Brittney for having such an insightful chat with Matt at PAX West this past weekend. You can watch the whole thing the recorded stream here.
