While not necessarily a flop, the Xbox One had many downfalls compared to the PS4, and definitely compared to the Nintendo Switch. But the common thread between those two companies is exclusives. They had them, and Xbox One had precious few, and sometimes, those exclusives turned out to be rather terrible, like the recently released, and long delayed, Crackdown 3. However, Microsoft has been making strides to fix this by buying up studios to bring them under their banner. Including Obsidian Entertainment, the team behind the upcoming Outer Worlds.
But as in all things, the question about this acquisition is “why? Why do it at all?” Well, CEO Feargus Urquhart sat down with Game Informer and gave his reasoning behind the merger:
“As a company we had to make a decision, when you’re running a business, it’s a little bit all about money,” he said. “We have a 160, 170 people, and we’re thinking about this in early 2018–where do we go? how do we do this?
He went on:
“If we want $40, 50, 60, 70 million to make the next big game, where do we get it? And we go to publishers, and we’ve talked to a lot of publishers through the years, but it’s harder and harder as an independent developer, there’s fewer and fewer of us—I guess now one less.”
He also noted that a change in the company was discussed:
“So a part of it we really had to think about: do we change the company,” he continued. “Do we not try to make these big RPGs? Do we do whatever we can to get these publishers to fund us? Do we go and get an investment from a company, or do we look at getting acquired?”
They chose to get acquired, and now they’ll be making The Outer Worlds for Xbox One alone, and they’ll get the money they need to make it and make it shine like they know they can do.
