Xbox boss Phil Spencer has shared new insight into the future of Microsoft`s gaming business. As part of a broad-ranging interview with The Guardian, he touches on providing better support for things like the platform`s first-party lineup, story-driven narrative games, and smaller developers interested in creating service-based games.Spencer spoke about the success of the games-as-a-service model, where games like Destiny are supported over the long-term rather than being released as a title that`s never updated or expanded. This in turn led to the subject of single-player, story-based games and how they don`t necessarily lend themselves to that model, which could lead to a decline in how often we see them.`I`ve looked at things like Netflix and HBO, where great content has been created because there`s this subscription model. [Xbox first-party publishing GM] Shannon Loftis and I are thinking a lot about, well, could we put story-based games into the Xbox Game Pass business model because you have a subscription going? It would mean you wouldn`t have to deliver the whole game in one month; you could develop and deliver the game as it goes.`Spencer has expressed a similar sentiment before, but Microsoft still has not announced any formal plans to release original games through Game Pass. The service`s alpha ends tomorrow, with a full launch set to follow sometime this spring.`The audience for those big story-driven games... I won`t say it isn`t as large, but they`re not as consistent,` Spencer said. `You`ll have things like Zelda or Horizon Zero Dawn that`ll come out, and they`ll do really well, but they don`t have the same impact that they used to have, because the big service-based games are capturing such a large amount of the audience. Sony`s first-party studios do a lot of these games, and they`re good at them, but outside of that, it`s difficult--they`re become more rare; it`s a difficult business decision for those teams, you`re fighting into more headwind. ...
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