Phil Spencer, the main person in charge of the Xbox brand, has given an interview to the business portal Business Insider in which he talks about the current situation of the video game industry and about how the coronavirus may be affecting the different development processes of the titles that are to come.
Phil seems pretty confident the games that will come to us in the coming months and even those who are planning to launch in mid or late 2021 they won't have too much trouble for COVID-19. "In summer or during autumn? I feel pretty good about those games. The titles that are scheduled for one year from today or later? They will have some impact but they will be able to react"he assures.
However, Phil Spencer is shown less confident with the titles planned for the first months of 2021, pointing out that some development processes have basically stopped at this time.
One of the examples that shows how it can affect these games is the capture of movements that "Basically it has stopped. We are not going to motion capture studios. If you have all your animations captured and you are working an individual art production or in areas like textures and other things you are in a better position"
The head of the Xbox brand ensures that studios in this situation are currently working in other areas of your games where you can progress while the aforementioned motion capture or symphony recording games have been paralyzed.
Xbox Series X coming in 2020 … but maybe not with all the expected games
In the interview Phil has remarked that Xbox Series X still has its release date set for late 2020 (In the same way that Sony did the same this morning with PS5). "Even though it's obvious that we don't travel to China, we feel good about our progress with the hardware"he comments."I have my own console at home and play most nights and feel good about the software updates we are doing"
On the other hand, even though the console s hitting stores at the end of the year Phil also notes that the launch could also be affected, probably not in the hardware itself but in some of the games that were scheduled to arrive with the new console:
"Due to the type of circumstances surrounding the launches, there may have been some impact. Some things were going to be launched and maybe they have been delayed a bit"he comments.
