Matt Booty Talks Showcase, Games, Studios, and More | Official Xbox Podcast

TINA AMINI: Games in this podcast range from E to M. Hello and welcome to the official Xbox podcast. We've got a special episode for you today coming off of a lot going on here at Xbox. We just announced our Double Feature Xbox Game Showcase and Gears E-Day Direct coming this summer. KilN Online multiplayer pottery party brawler from Double Fine -- I can't believe I got that -- is out next week, and present content creators just got hands-on previews of Forza Horizon 6 for the first time. That's a lot, and I'm nearly out of breath so it's really good that I've got a friend to the podcast, now with a new title, Xbox Chief Content Officer, Matt Booty. Welcome, Matt.

MATT BOOTY: Hi. I'm super impressed you rattled off the multiplayer pottery party brawler.

TINA AMINI: Online multiplayer party -- you know what? When you think about it, it gets to be too much.

MATT BOOTY: It's a genre that's heating up.

TINA AMINI: Exactly, first of its kind.

MATT BOOTY: We're in early.

TINA AMINI: Yes, well I'm so glad to have you here because I feel like we didn't just have seven hours of a meeting together in showcase planning; it just wasn't enough.

MATT BOOTY: We did, but it was a good meeting.

TINA AMINI: It was.

MATT BOOTY: I should let people in on that. We did, yesterday, review all of the trailers for the upcoming Showcase, and it's probably one of my favorite meetings of the year, I think.

TINA AMINI: For sure.

MATT BOOTY: Well, it's just cool to see the teams. There's some stuff that's really done, some stuff that's not done, some stuff that's amazing, some things that need a little work, but it's the reflection of all the work that the teams are doing, and we all get to come together. It's a great point of the year where everybody's working together on one thing, which is always a lot of fun. I just like the "let's put on a show" aspect of it, right? It's a lot of fun.

TINA AMINI: Absolutely, a whole group of people come together, first party, third party, everyone's kind of coming in an effort of how do we surprise and delight our audience? Are there secrets we should spill about the planning process of Showcase?

MATT BOOTY: I don't know about that. I'll say that we've got Gears Direct coming, and after seeing that, we've probably got a full 30 minutes, which is really great. I don't know. I just love everybody in that studio, the work they're doing. I'm excited about the game, and it's just -- we're going to have a full 30 minutes of stuff to see, which will be great.

TINA AMINI: Yeah, absolutely. We aim to deliver, and it was great. I was just at the coalition filming the direct. We wrapped on that production and just a really wonderful team, very passionate about what they do, very talented with everything that they do. I want to talk about them, and I want to talk about all the other studios, but before we get into that, I feel like we got to talk about this fancy new title. What does this mean for you? What does this mean for the studios, too?

MATT BOOTY: Well, I think it's more of the latter, right? The title is more than anything, a reflection of the work that the studios do. It is so core to who we are as Xbox and all the work that all our teams do across all our studios. It's a validation of their work. The title, I think you see it in other places, you see it in film, you see it in publishing. I think it brings just, again, a validation that says that Xbox takes these studios seriously, that Microsoft takes it seriously, and that content, the things we build, all our great games is important. That's really what it's about. For me, my job stays the same. We were just talking about this. It's such a privilege to be able to work with all these teams and probably the best part of my job is having visibility into everything that they're all doing, and fortunately for me, none of that changes.

TINA AMINI: Yeah, you've always been on the circuit visiting studios, seeing what they're building, so what has that been like? Who have you seen lately? What have you played?

MATT BOOTY: Yeah, well, there's just so much going on. I mean, I could almost just mentally do the tour of what's going on, right? I mean, we've got things that have been announced, so we've got Mojang with Dungeons 2, so there's that to see.

TINA AMINI: That's just announced, yeah.

MATT BOOTY: This will be a little bit of a laundry list, but as I just kind of mentally walk the studios, Undead Labs has got the alpha for State of Decay 3.

TINA AMINI: So excited for State of Decay 3.

MATT BOOTY: That's cool, and it's great to see that they're at that point. I go to Blizzard and we see all the progress that they've made with Overwatch, which is great. Then at the end of the month is the Lord of Hatred Expansion for D4, Diablo 4, also coming along great. I mean, it's just amazing every time I go to visit Blizzard, you're just reminded of sort of the history of Blizzard, and also, just the kind of level of art and craft that exists there, which is great.

TINA AMINI: Some of the best cinematics in the industry.

MATT BOOTY: Yeah, and later on, we can talk a little bit about that because it's cool what they're doing with some of our teams, so we can circle back on that.

TINA AMINI: Yeah, we've got too much to talk about.

MATT BOOTY: We've got too much to talk about, but we've got that going on. Elder Scrolls, they just started their new approach. They kind of call it the Season Zero thing, which is great, and it's exciting to see the reaction. It was cool to see some of the Starfield stuff before that came out.

TINA AMINI: Huge update.

MATT BOOTY: Big update. I mean, really, kind of a 1.5 release, really, when you think about it. It's great to bring in new players on new platforms and bring them into the game that Bethesda has built.

TINA AMINI: The universe, truly.

MATT BOOTY: Yeah, and it's cool to see online, too, some of the things you read where they're like, hey, this might be shaping up now and evolving into being one of their best RPGs in quite a while, so that's really cool to see, right? We've got things going on across the studio, so there's just -- I could kind of walk the list. I mean, seeing the latest that Obsidian's got going on with Grounded 2, the continued work there. You've got, obviously, all the continued seasons work going on with Call of Duty. Rattling all this off, I guess, to bring it to a point, what it makes me think of is just, we have got such an amazing lineup of IP, an amazing lineup of studios. I think in even just entertainment broadly, it's an amazing portfolio, which is just really cool to see that we've got that. Even some of the things that are going on, even as we think about portfolio extension into movies and TV stuff, it's great to keep up with that. I make the joke, we've got everything from, like, Kiln to COD.

TINA AMINI: Absolutely.

MATT BOOTY: Everything from Minecraft to Warcraft. There's probably more of those I could do, but it's --

TINA AMINI: Yeah, great cadence, that's a song in itself.

MATT BOOTY: It's just always fun to get out and see the studios. You started out saying, wow, there's kind of a lot going on across Xbox right now, a lot of change, a lot of change in the industry, but the thing that just grounds me is when we go to talk with our studios, it's just everybody's working hard. They're all passionate, excited about their game that they're building, which is really cool.

TINA AMINI: Absolutely, yeah. We really do have just an incredible span of very different teams working with very different specialties across -- we've got AAA shooters. We've got inventive party experiences. We've got mind-bending genres and dramas. It's just a lot that you would assume people are kind of working in their own creative bubbles because everything's very specializing and what they're really focused on, but that's actually not the case.

MATT BOOTY: No. It is the case that we have got a lot of different kinds of studios, and they've all got their own cultures, so we think of it as a culture of cultures. I see a big part of my job is to provide just enough connection and just enough structure across those that they can communicate with each other, that they can share things back and forth, but never to the point that we're coming in over the top trying to change who they are. We've really seen a lot, once we build those connections, of teams starting to share things with each other. Our team in Vancouver, The Coalition, they are really our center of excellence for Unreal Engine work, and that is benefiting the teams, for example, at Bryan Fargo's studio in Exile, working on Clockwork Revolution. They're able to benefit from all of the really technical work that they're doing up at The Coalition. There are other examples. We've got the Blizzard Cinematics team helping out on Fable. We've got our studio in Montreal, Compulsion Games, using the Activision Mo Cap studio. We've got, I think, the team at Rare, a lot of multiplayer experience working on Sea of Thieves, helping out Double Fine on Kiln, the pottery game. There's a lot of examples of that. One, maybe just to sort of show a more complicated round trip, you had State of Decay 2, which had some pretty sophisticated technology for doing saving shared worlds and how you sort of save this persistent state, and the team at Obsidian, which is a really small team that built Grounded, took that tech to use in Grounded, but then the people at Obsidian kind of added to it, and now it's gone first circle back to Undead Labs to be in State of Decay 3. That's kind of a cool example of how once we build these pathways, there's a lot going on in between the different teams.

TINA AMINI: Yeah, I love that they're building on each other's work, not just sharing in one direction, but actually kind of, as you said, bringing that back together. I think King and Mojang have also done work together.

MATT BOOTY: Yeah, the game that we announced, Minecraft Blast, right? That's more of a game design, gameplay thing, but it's just cool that those two teams can get together and think about, hey, we've got King's expertise. We've got Mojang with the IP. Is there something that we can do? It goes beyond just technology sharing. I mean, there's a lot of tools and approaches to things, best practices that are also moving back and forth between our studios.

TINA AMINI: You mentioned the Coalition, and I love that literally XGTG exists at the Coalition run by Kate Rayner, so what is the XGTG?

MATT BOOTY: Yeah, I think it's Xbox Games Technology Group. That is the group that really has the center of excellence around Unreal Engine work and then takes that out and makes it available to the other studios. They're not brought in to work on the games and they're not a firefighting team. They are developing the technology but packaging it up in a way that it's very easy to hand off to the other studios. We could probably sit here for a while, we could do a little TED Talk on all the things going on, but we've got a lot of RPG teams. They're sharing narrative tools, and this even goes back to things like some of the in-game store technology that was in Minecraft made its way into Flight Simulator, which then made its way into Starfield. We try to stay out of the way but provide those pathways so that sharing can happen.

TINA AMINI: Yeah, I love that. We've got some of the best people in the business, so why not idea share? More brains are better than one. We're seeing so much of those skill sets and all that idea sharing really reflected in the content, too. It has been an eventful spring to say the least, so much so that I actually need to consult my notes just to keep up with the sheer volume of it. We've got Overwatch just launched Season 2. We already know who the new damage hero is, Sierra, the sixth new hero just added this year alone. Starfield just released a massive freelance update for all platforms. One of the coolest things obviously being you can cruise between planets, but tons of other updates and adds and improvements in that massive update. Elder Scrolls Online launched Season Zero, Dawn and Dusk, new zones, challenges, a whole host of improvements there as well. Kiln is releasing next week. Diablo 4, Lord of Hatred releases shortly after one. That's a big new expansion with a new campaign, new classes, Paladin, Warlock -- shout out to Warlock, frankly, a new region, and also, you get Vessel of Hatred for free actually alongside that. Then of course we have tons of other things that I can't even remember.

MATT BOOTY: I know, yeah, that was impressive.

TINA AMINI: Thank you.

MATT BOOTY: The only thing, as I'm going through the list, we've got Minecraft Dungeons 2.

TINA AMINI: Yeah, announced at Minecraft Live.

MATT BOOTY: Which is noteworthy. I think it's the first sequel, the actual sequel, that Minecraft has ever had. Minecraft has done a lot that --

TINA AMINI: It was momentous.

MATT BOOTY: -- we've ever had a "2" attached to anything.

TINA AMINI: Yes, oh, my gosh, milestone.

MATT BOOTY: We've seen a lot of that come together, and it's looking really good.

TINA AMINI: Yeah, we're very busy teams here.

MATT BOOTY: Yes.

TINA AMINI: Then, of course, Forza Horizon 6.

MATT BOOTY: We've got Forza, yeah, which is just looking amazing. I had a moment, we got to see a cut of the trailer, some stuff that will come out later, but it just took me back to, there's a time when I grew up making games myself, racing games really were a pretty dominant genre in the industry. There were new racing games that would come out, and you'd be so excited, and just what the team has done and the combination of the music that they've brought in and the location and the setting, I had that same sense of excitement of going to play other racing games for the first time, and a lot for me, it was in the arcades. They've done such a good job with that series. The reality is, we're in a hit driven business, right? Games, like movies, like music, a lot of things, very hit driven, so for Playground working in conjunction with Turn 10 to have delivered that series, and now with FH6, it's not just a next or like a sideways move. It really feels like a whole new, fresh game. I don't know, I'm very excited. The stuff that we're seeing is really well put together. It's pretty cool.

TINA AMINI: We're seeing that in previews too. I actually grabbed a couple quotes here that I felt were really reflective of a lot of the technical achievement and the cultural achievement. We've been waiting for Japan for so long, so from TechRadar, this quote is, "Watching passing tower blocks glimmer back to me off the bonnet, I'm convinced driving in a game has simply never looked this good." They go on to say -- the last entry, "Handling changes realistically depending on the weather conditions, too, and my cars picked up an embarrassing number of scrapes the first time I was caught out in pouring rain." That's just such an enjoyable experience that as you get kind of familiar with the game and the environment and the cars and just seeing all of that impact in the environment and on the cars, it's just really cool to see some of that pickup.

MATT BOOTY: Yeah, and along those lines, we always think about any Forza game as a technical showcase, right? Cars are so great to show that off with the reflections and the materials, the paint and the metal and the rubber and glass and everything. It's really cool, but one of the bigger innovations that we're going to see in Forza Horizon 6 is also just the jump in and play social aspects, right, which is such a part of gaming today. The team has really, really put in the time and the hours and the features to make it a game that not only looks great, but is going to really, I think, lend itself to a lot of social play and a lot of easy jump-in play.

TINA AMINI: Yeah, we featured Forza Horizon 6 in our Developer Direct, our Multi-Title Developer Direct in January. The team really talked a lot about that, about progression, about those experiences. I'm excited to see how all that goes coming later this year. There was a lot of conversation, too, from previews that I saw about the digital tourism of it, just the sheer beauty of how everything is represented, not just realistically, but just very, very well detailed and thought out and -- yes, please.

MATT BOOTY: Yeah, well, on that, it's so interesting you bring that up, that digital tourism, because I hadn't thought about that in the terms of Forza. But yeah, there are times where you just want to drive around and look at things. What caught me on that is we've seen a lot of that with Flight Simulator, right, which is -- it can just generate such amazing graphics. On the one hand, there's study level 737s that you can basically go train in an airplane.

TINA AMINI: Yeah, literally, pilots train in it.

MATT BOOTY: That's for somebody that's out here, but then there's a whole other aspect of that, the simulator, which is, I just want to fly over my house, right? I just want to -- what's it like to fly over Niagara Falls, right? What's it like to fly over the Serengeti? I love that. I think that there's room for all of that. It's just fantastic that you brought that up about Forza, because I hadn't put that together before.

TINA AMINI: Yeah, Flight Sim is really interesting. I have two older brothers, we grew up gaming, but they don't have time for it anymore. This is their perspective. My oldest brother plays nothing but Flight Sim anymore, because he loves having that realistic experience. It's so actually part of what a pilot's experience is, that it's nice to have that simulation. I even think about that with Kiln. You can just sit and make pots all day if you want. You don't have to actually pay the part. Damn it, I can't say it anymore. You know.

MATT BOOTY: Stick to the pottery, no party problem.

TINA AMINI: Yeah, exactly, no more puns on that. IGN did talk a lot about that digital tourism. I thought this one line from their preview was funny, which says, "If the preview didn't have a cutoff time, I can guarantee you I'd still be playing it now, not bad for a build with just a tiny sliver of the 550 cars coming on day one." That's a lot of just wanting to live and breathe the world.

MATT BOOTY: Yeah, yeah.

TINA AMINI: My final quote that I think is pretty apt is from GamesRadar. It says, "Fueled by Playground's relentless pursuit of excellence, Forza Horizon 6 is set to become one of the best racing games of the generation." Frankly, if you took the out of context quote of "relentless pursuit of excellence," I would have been, like, are you talking about Playground? It's very apt in that sense and very cool to see that celebration right now.

MATT BOOTY: It's all a reflection of the work that goes on at Playground and them working in conjunction with Turn 10 over the last few years, going over there and just seeing what a sophisticated development organization it is. The biggest thing that's probably changed in video games maybe over the last 20 years or so is the level of specialization that happens. With a game like that, there's just so many of these deep verticals in terms of car handling and graphics and physics and terrain and the features. When you visit there, it's an amazing and sophisticated operation. It's great to see that reflected in some of what you're reading.

TINA AMINI: Absolutely, and it's the stuff that our players are looking for from those games, so the attention to detail, very important to everybody involved. So yeah, great to see that celebrated. Well, we've been talking a lot about what's coming up, but if we look backwards just a little bit and think about GDC, Jason Ronald was at GDC talking about Project Helix and talking about this platform where you get to play your Xbox games and your PC games. I would love to understand what does this mean for the game teams? How are they involved in developing Xbox's console hardware feature?

MATT BOOTY: Yeah, one of the really cool things about us as a publishing and game development organization that makes us different from a lot of other big publishers in the industry is that we are side-by-side in the same org with the hardware team, right? Our teams are involved early on with thinking about the visioning, what's the planning, what are the specs? Of course, we're there every step of the way as these things come along, so it's an exciting time. It's great to have the news out there and to be announced. As we've done with many consoles before, those two teams will work hand-in-hand as we get that together. As the hardware comes online, our teams will be the first to get involved. There's already a lot of that already happening, but that is, I think, where Xbox really shines and where we stand apart and what shows off what's unique about us, both as a platform and as a set of game development studios -- when we come together. The announcement of Project Helix was an exciting moment to kind of showcase that.

TINA AMINI: Yeah, I'm sure exciting for people to just start briefly talking about it as we continue to reveal more there. We've talked a lot about the studio talent, developing talent at Xbox, sharing skill sets. I really think there's something to Xbox's history around supporting emerging developers, for a long line of history, actually. A lot of people think about ID@Xbox as a perfect example of that, or discovery channels like XBLA back in the day or Game Pass today, but there's also Game Camp. What is that program?

MATT BOOTY: Game Camp, it's really an amazing program. It is a way for us to provide mentorship and access and support to people who are early in career and are interested in getting into working in games but might not have access to it because, either where they are, where they live, they're not in a big hub city. Game Camp really starts with this idea that the tagline has become, "Extraordinary talent resides everywhere." Even though somebody might, again, not have direct access to it, it doesn't mean that they don't have great ideas about making games. It started fairly small, but it's all the people on our teams, right? They put in extra time above and beyond their day jobs to come together and really provide this structured mentoring sort of system where we run it like a camp. That's just the best name for it. We get the campers together. They will come together. We work with cities and locations to give us space to work in, and they'll form teams. They build games. They get feedback and advice. The really cool thing is that if you're in Game Camp, you might hear about game coding from one of the people that works on something like Forza. You might hear about game design from somebody like Todd Howard, right? You get that exposure and that access, and then they're really guided to work in teams and put together a product. Some of those teams have gone on to actually form professional game teams. They've shipped games into ID@Xbox. They've shipped them elsewhere. We've had some of those folks that go through Game Camp come and work on our game teams. It's really fantastic. There's the old kind of cheesy saying, but "Camp is for the counselors," and I think the people on our teams, the folks on our teams, really also get a lot out of it because they're putting in extra time, and they see that there's people that have interest in games and a passion for it, and all they really needed was a way to get started, a way to get going. We've done this in so many locations. We've done it in Detroit, in New Orleans, in Belgium, in Africa, in Sweden. We've really gone around the world to do this, and we've kind of got it turned into a program to the point that this year, we're going to be doing a Game Camp in Minnesota in partnership with Best Buy. They have their Best Buy Foundation, and they're going to come in and help us with sponsorship, and they're going to help organize it and really help rally the community. You know, it's such a big part of Game Camp, too, is the location matters, so I'm excited. I think it's a great validation of the program. It's a great reflection of our teams leaning in, as you said, because, upcoming and emerging developers, it's such an important part of who we are. It's just an amazing opportunity for people that are really early in career to get access to things that they might not have otherwise.

TINA AMINI: That talent really does exist everywhere.

MATT BOOTY: Yeah.

TINA AMINI: Well, we're getting close to our time here. I think they're going to kick me out, not you, obviously. I did want to ask you, we've talked about a lot of how this year is shaping up to be very busy for us, very content-filled. We've got studios expanding into new IP. We've got more DLC and seasonal content coming everywhere on our live service games. We've got all the recent announcements about what's coming up next. When you look at all of that and you look at our portfolio and our content this year, what's the thing that really stands out for you?

MATT BOOTY: Wow. Well, now you're just asking me to pick a favorite kid, and that's almost impossible.

TINA AMINI: I know. Just between you and I, no one else is listening.

MATT BOOTY: We just took a trip down to Irvine, and we've got quite a lot of studios there with Blizzard Campus and then Obsidian and with InXile. We got to see the latest updates on Clockwork Revolution, which is just really coming along, right? I think it's a bit of a cliche to say they punch above their weight, but it's kind of hard. You've got to remind yourself, this is a team of 100 people, and it looks like a lot more than that. It really is coming along. That's fresh in my mind in terms of what we see. Macro, I would say it's great that I can look through the rest of this calendar year, and we've got some really big games with big franchises and lines up with the 25th anniversary of Xbox, but then it keeps going, right, which is exciting. I hope that that's a reflection of us getting to a cadence of things where we've hit this kind of critical mass where we can make sure that there's big things coming mixed with some of the smaller things, mixed with the updates, with the goal of just making sure that all of our games have got their own window and their own time to shine.

TINA AMINI: Well, my backlog thanks you, so I appreciate that. It really is incredible because there's so many different types of games, too, kind of a something for everybody, which is a lot of what our shows reflect as well. I have to say that because I'm the show's person, but I think that's a great place to go out on. Thank you so much for coming to hang out with us and chat with us. Any final thoughts that you want to share before we sign off?

MATT BOOTY: No, just -- talking about this, it just reminds me how hard our teams are working and just every game is just a reflection of hard work. These things don't come together easily, and they've come together when there's a lot of change in the industry, some new things going on at Xbox, and I'm just always appreciative of the hard work that our teams do and the great partnership we've got with everybody across Xbox.

TINA AMINI: Yes, likewise, agreed. I would not have my job without that myself. Well, thank you again, Matt, and to everyone watching and listening, thank you for joining us. We'll see you in the next episode of the official Xbox podcast very soon. [ Music ]